‘HEARTBREAKING’
The fourth-floor intensive care unit at Cleveland Clinic Akron General is where the sickest of the sick with COVID-19 get sent for treatment. ● It’s where patients can stay for weeks, much if not all of that time sedated and tethered to often-beeping machines that keep them alive. ● Sometimes patients get better and can leave to continue their recovery elsewhere. And sometimes they don’t.
Looking over all of this are about 100 nurses, doctors and others who typically work 12-hour shifts for three, four or five or more days a week. The hospital allowed the Beacon Journal in to see the work being done there and talk with staff who included the ICU nurse manager, a doctor and others.
The fourth-floor ICU has 24 single-room beds. On Friday, 22 of the 24 ICU rooms were filled, all but one with COVID-19 patients. (The hospital has opened up other parts of its building to provide intensive care services to patients, since the fourth floor section is often full.)
Family members hospitalized at same time
One room became available because the Covid-positive patient there, a man, died earlier in the morning. The nurse caring for that patient left Thursday night for home expecting to see him again the next day. She cried when she came in Friday and learned he passed.
The wife of that male patient is also a patient elsewhere in the hospital, said Beth Srock, the ICU nursing manager. “We are seeing a lot of that, families decimated because multiple family members are in the hospital at the same time.”