Pandemic Parables: Changes
Pandemic Parables: Changes
The changes happening at the hospital over the last few days have been constant and confusing as the senior leadership battle to keep ahead of the overwhelming surge we all fear is coming.
The very visible change is that from now on all staff all have to wear cloth face masks from the time we leave our cars until we return. “I feel like a bandit” said one male nursing assistant. I nodded in agreement. And it is surprisingly odd not to be able to see if people are smiling. I suspect we will all end up with very expressive eyes.
There are so many other changes happening in what feels like quick fire succession. Including an increase of Coronavirus patients and an expansion of areas in which to care for them.
As of Friday we had 41 Covid-19 patients in the hospital, nine confirmed to have the virus. The others have the symptoms, are awaiting tests, and of course have to be isolated and treated as though
they are positive.
The ICU unit now has only Covid-19 patients. I walked through there on Friday. (The area’s regularly assigned chaplain was away.) Faces were tense, conversations terse, and a large sign said “Are you wearing enough PPE?” (Personal protective equipment.)
Later I met a high level nurse assigned to the ICU from a different specialized area. It was at the end of twelve hour shift. This strong, intelligent woman was close to tears from exhaustion and suppressed fear. It was an honor to pray for her as she stood in line to get coffee. How I wish I could have hugged her - an impossibility from six feet apart.
Other sections of the hospital have been turned into overflow ICU units. On Wednesday one of those units was in my part of the hospital. (I am assigned to the Emergency Department, Same Day Surgery, and the Third Floor.) The PAC-U is the recovery area for same day surgery. It has been eerily quiet since elective surgeries were put on hold. On Friday, to my surprise, it was suddenly filled with non virus patients who normally would have been upstairs in the ICU. These were seriously ill people. The space was tight and divided by curtains as patients are usually transient. I anointed one patient with oil and prayed for him and his already grieving spouse, knowing he had little time to live. At the same time someone was sweeping the floor feet from his bed. That would not usually ever happen. But then this area is not usually an ICU and everyone is learning to adjust.
To staff this new ICU area, nurses had been brought from other places in the hospital and quickly retrained, but the systems were different from what they were used to. Great difficultly and stress ensued. Recognizing the problem, Management stepped in and changed gears rapidly. (They have been admirable in their handling of this unprecedented crisis.) The next day the whole overflow area had been moved to the second floor of the hospital closer to the original ICU.
I only discovered this the day after praying for the dying patient when I walked through the once again deserted space. It was as though the whole unit had been vaporized. The beds, the curtains, the patients were gone. Remaining were just a few stunned looking nurses who told me what had happened. “It feels like a morgue in here” I said before stopping myself in horror. Then we all burst out laughing to break the tension. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that” said one of the nurses as we looked at each other knowingly, trying to suppress images of the overflowing body count in New York.
I saw one truly marvelous nurse, a good friend, that I hadn’t seen for several days. That’s because instead of being in colorful clothes she was in scrubs wearing a surgical mask. She is a hospice nurse who has been commandeered for the ICU. She doesn’t mind. “I am a nurse” she said. “I am trained to go where I’m needed, to the hurting, the dying. All of my team is like that. We are called. We go.”
Where my friend is most needed at the moment with the Covid-19 patients. This woman has the most enormous heart. She, and her fellow nurses and medical staff, care enormously. She had recently been at the bedside of a dying Virus patient holding their hand through her surgical glove to ensure the patient didn’t die alone. If I, or my fellow chaplains had been allowed into the room we would have done the same. But the declining supplies of PPE have to be kept for the medical staff. So in some areas the nurses are doing the work of the chaplains. And the chaplains job, now more than ever, is to care for the nurses and the rest of the staff.
I was told of a chaplain intern who walked into the Emergency Department (when we were still allowed to go in freely) and was moved to see a nurse holding the hand of a patient and praying with them. I went to the bedside of a non-virus patient a couple of days ago. The patient’s daughter had promised him he wouldn’t die alone and had set up vigil by his bedside. I came in to pray, comfort, and, at the daughter’s request, to anoint her father with oil. Afterwards the daughter told me, with tears in her eyes, that a nurse had come in at the end of her overnight shift and offered to pray before she drove home. An offer that was gratefully accepted.
All this to say that we have the most incredibly loving, caring staff. The chaplains fervently pray that Covid-19 patients, who are forbidden visitors, are surrounded by divine love, compassion, and heaven-sent angels - both spiritual and human. And we trust and believe that those prayers are being answered.
Of course the hospital has patients that are not virus patients, although at less than half the capacity of before. Some areas are very quiet and their regular nursing staff have been reassigned to other sections of the hospital where there is a greater need. The nurses are willing, but still it is discombobulating for them to have so many changes.
I walked through one of my areas on Friday, which was April 3rd. It was even quieter than it has been recently. “Where are the patients?” I asked one nurse. “We had ten patients leave yesterday” she said. “They were here drying out. It is the beginning of the month. I suspect the Coronavirus tension was too much for them and they’ve gone to the liquor store.”
We are all learning to cope with the stress of the ever-present virus in different ways.
Tension is indeed everywhere. It is there in abundance in the hospital, in the grocery stores, in the streets. I crawled home on Friday night, exhausted and feeling like a wound up spring. That tension turned me into a klutz. On Saturday morning I was making breakfast. My arm swept across the counter causing a carton containing six eggs to hurtle skywards and land smashed and seeping across the floor. I could have wept at the waste. My store is usually out of eggs these days so I couldn’t just put on hazmat gear, pop down there and restock.
But when I stared again at the mess I realized that two of the eggs were only cracked. I put them on to fry while cleaning up the sticky debris.
They were delicious.
In a way I think those eggs are a picture of what is happening in our lives. Everything we hold precious is up in the air. Some of it will never be restored back to the way it was. Even what is left might seem a loss at first. A heartbreak. But somehow, with God’s great grace, when we get through this season. And we shall get through it. That which is left behind will sustain us.
More than that, it will be good.
More than that, it will be good.
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