ST. LOUIS (KMOX)-As COVID-19 cases spike again, hospitals are nearing capacity, placing additional stress on healthcare workers who have been dealing with the novel coronavirus since March. Dr. Mike Klevens, Emergency Medical Services Director at St. Luke's Hospital, says while treatments have improved over the months, and hospital stays are shorter, the constant flow of patients is demoralizing.
"There are just more and more folks coming in," he says. "It's almost like there's not an end in sight. It's like you can't see the horizon and I think that's the most difficult part of anything."
At Barnes Jewish Hospital, Assistant Nurse Manager Mitch Tiller says they are meeting several times a day to figure out how to handle the sheer number of patients. "We have meetings anywhere from every two hours, to every four hours, sometimes even more than that if need be," he says. "It's just constantly, we're talking about what we have available, how can we make more room. Making sure we have appropriate discharges and getting people out when they're safe and ready but getting them out so they're not staying longer than they need to make sure we have open beds. It is a constant conversation to make sure we have room for people."
Adding to the stress, according to Mercy Respiratory Therapist Danny Lutz, is the fact that family members are not allowed to visit the patients. "You talk to these patients and they want to be your friend," he says. "They're very, very sweet people. They're just members of our own community, but you can see that it wears them down. That's the last thing you want in a patient that's got this pandemic, viral illlness, they get down on themselves because they cant see their family members. It's hard for us to see all these patients and not see the support system they used to have."
Klevens says it's especially difficult when the patient doesn't recover. "There was a time when a patient in the emergency department was dying because of COVID. We had one of our nurses sit there with her hand holding his hand the entire time while he was dying. This was about an hour-and-a-half, two-hour process, and she was the surrogate family for this person. This happens every day, not necessarily the dying, but our nurses, our doctors, all our staff are surrogate family for these patients."
Lutz, Klevens and Tiller all express frustration that some people don't believe that COVID is serious and that hospitals are full. Lutz describes a surreal scene in the room of a patient who was unconscious and on a ventilator. "On the TV," he says, "they're talking about 'We're rounding the corner. It's getting better. It's not that bad. The percentage of people that actually die is super low. This is not that big of a deal.' I'm looking at the TV screen in this patient's room, then I turn and look at the patient who is extremely sick, right there! It's just bizarre."
