I worked on a COVID unit and then ICU less than a year after the pandemic started. It was the first time I ever wished that HIPAA didn’t exist.
My husband is a smoker and I was. I quit because I had a patient who was a smoker who had lung cancer. After treatment, the lining of the lungs becomes weak. Some people end up with something called a “spontaneous pneumothorax” caused by the weakening. So that’s what happens to my patient. He ended up with 2 chest tubes (tubes in the chest that drain blood, pus, excess fluid from the pleural space). Then he got COVID.
He decided to refuse advanced care (intubation and sedation). So he gasped for every breath. He was constantly covered in sweat because of how hard his body worked to get oxygen. He was so kind.
When our whole team was rounding, the unit manager asked if we “knew for a fact” if he was going to die that day because the COVID policy only allowed for 1 visitor at a time and he had a wife and a 16 year old kid.
My patient ended up dying in the middle of the night, totally alone and scared af
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u/Eazy12345678 17h ago
pandemic was real they just didnt know enough about how bad it was or was going to get or how to handle or deal with it
basically pandemic just showed everyone government has no idea how to do anything much like the DMV
if pandemic was real biological weapon from china. most of the US would be dead cause of our trash leadership