A plea from front lines of COVID-19 battle
A pulmonary and critical care physician with Lehigh Valley Health Network shares her insight.
As a pulmonary and critical care physician with Lehigh Valley Health Network, I have been on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic for nearly nine months. As the number of people who need hospitalization for COVID-19 continues to increase, you need to stay strong.
What I saw with COVID-19 patients last spring will stay with me for a lifetime. You can’t imagine how difficult it was to stand with exhausted nurses in one of our intensive care unit rooms, holding the hands of patients in their last moments of life because it was too dangerous for family members to be there with them.
The ICU team experienced the physical exhaustion of caring for hundreds of COVID patients. We were emotionally exhausted trying to offset the loneliness of our patients and their loved ones at the same time. Our hearts were in this, too, always hoping for our patients to overcome this. We saw the virus cause patients to not breathe well and organ systems to stop functioning. We celebrated the success of every recovery and rally.
Yet it was so heartbreaking. Our extensive training and expertise were of limited help because the medical community knew so little about the virus. There were so many COVID-19 patients, and there was no way to tell if and when it might become unmanageable. We prepared for the worst-case scenario and even built additional ICU spaces but thankfully did not need them.
As we learned more about COVID, experts were able to develop treatments that could make a difference. I read everything I could to help the network COVID leadership team create our hospital ICU response plan. Across the country, people wore masks, washed their hands and kept socially distant, and we were able to flatten the infection rate curve. Our COVID-19 patient population dropped. It gave our dedicated health care professionals a fighting chance against the virus.
Somewhere along the line, we as a nation seem to have become less diligent about the rituals health experts recommended to avoid infection as best we could. I don’t know if it’s politically motivated or if we can blame it on the enormous amount of information and disinformation that surrounds us every day. Perhaps selfimposed isolation for so long simply became too much to endure. I don’t know the reasons. I only see the outcome in the hospital.
The reasons don’t matter very much anymore. What does matter is the raging spike in infections. Our COVID-19 population at our Cedar Crest hospital is approaching critical levels, similar to our peak levels at the beginning of the pandemic. We are better prepared clinically to combat it, but that’s of little comfort if we become overwhelmed with hospitalized COVID patients. While much of the public cites the high percentage of those who recover, I wish people would realize this virus is easily spread and dangerous.
We’ve recorded more than 260,000 deaths across the country, but that doesn’t take into account the patients who reached extremely critical points of illness and somehow managed to pull back from death. Early on, this may have been an issue that affected mainly the elderly, but we’re now regularly seeing young patients in the hospital, including in intensive care. We still don’t know what sort of long-term effects this virus can cause. Many patients who have recovered have reported health problems in its aftermath.
This surge in the virus is real. It is not a media creation or some attempt to influence people. It is vitally important that you wear a mask that properly covers nose and mouth, regularly wash your hands and maintain social distance. If you have any signs of illness, it is critical that you stay home and seek medical advice.
Vaccines give us hope that there is light at the end of this awful tunnel. But please, do your part to help make sure you, your loved ones and all other Americans and citizens of the world can reach the end of that tunnel.
I am grateful to those who follow the recommendations. Properly masking is the greatest act of love for humanity that we can demonstrate. We owe that to one another.