❦ ‘I bring you:
The 77 things I hated about what COVID did to the human body.’
© 2022 Dr. Heather Patterson, Emergency Physician. Calgary, Canada. ➲
From the book “Shadows and Light”, by Dr. Heather Patterson ~ “Shadows and Light: A Physician’s Lens on COVID” ➤
© 2022 Dr. Heather Patterson. ➲
❦ The 77 things I hated about what COVID did to the human body.
1. It killed people.
2. I hated that it was so infectious that I would be the only one in the room with them as they died.
3. It destroyed lungs. In a desperate attempt to get oxygen into them, we would nurse them on their stomachs.
4. I hated the fear in a patient’s eyes as they desperately struggled to breathe.
5. The decimation of the human body as we fight to keep them alive months into their ICU stay.
6. The clots… so many clots.
7. The PEs.
8. The strokes.
9. The DVTs.
10. The dead bowel.
11. The brain inflammation.
12. The confusion.
13. The acute delirium.
14. The psychosis.
15. The hallucinations.
16. The brain fog.
17. The acute kidney injury.
18. The chronic kidney failure.
19. The Continuous Renal Replacement Therapy.
20. The heart attacks.
21. The heart inflammation.
22. The heart failure.
23. The heart arrhythmias.
24. The circulatory failure.
25. The need for intense drugs to keep blood flow to vital organs.
26. The multiple huge lines inserted to large blood vessels to deliver these massive doses of drugs.
27. The multiple lines inserted into blood vessels to monitor pressures in the body.
28. The tubes through the mouth to ventilate lungs.
29. The tube through the neck to ventilate lungs longer term.
30. The oppressive, tight face masks pushing in oxygen and keeping lungs open.
31. The copious sputum.
32. Helping patients when they can no longer cough out the sputum by sucking it out with tubes.
33. The desperately huge breaths that patients take when gasping for breath that they pop holes in their lungs.
34. The dead fingers and toes.
35. The swollen skin.
36. The blisters.
37. Skin falling off in chunks.
38. Pressure injuries because we had to position patients in abnormal ways as we desperately try to keep oxygen delivery to vital organs.
39. The diarrhoea.
40. The nausea.
41. The loss of taste.
42. The lack of appetite.
43. The inability to eat for months on end because of the tubes and weakness.
44. The tube through the nose to get liquid food direct to the gut.
45. The wounds from surgery after having dead gut removed.
46. The bacterial and fungal infections that spread in the immune-weakened body.
47. The unwanted side effects of life-saving drugs.
48. The fear.
49. The anxiety.
50. The stress.
51. The pain.
52. The itch.
53. The weakness.
54. The loss of independence.
55. The embarrassment.
56. The loss of control.
57. The loss of connection with the outside world.
58. The separation from family.
59. The separation from friends.
60. Missing out on sharing life events.
61. Not being with family members as they also suffered from COVID, not being able to comfort them.
62. Not getting to say goodbye to your life partner as they died in the room down the hall.
63. Facilitating connections with loved ones over FaceTime.
64. Facilitating goodbyes over FaceTime.
65. Making ‘that’ phone call at 3am.
66. On the rare chance we could get family in – rushing to dress the family in PPE meticulously and carefully but quickly to get them in in time.
67. Patients not being able to talk. With a tube in your throat, you can’t talk.
68. Frustration that you can’t communicate.
69. Losing months of your life. Waking up to be told you’ve been unconscious for 3 months.
70. Isolation.
71. Working with a machine to learn how to breathe again.
72. Losing control of your bladder and bowel.
73. Learning how to walk again.
74. Having to put control of every body function into someone else’s hands.
75. Nightmares.
76. Crying in PPE.
77. Knowing all you can do is stroke a forehead, and hold a hand.
❂
What we did back then to prevent COVID further ripping through our unvaccinated population was worth it.
What we achieved as a country is something to be proud of.
❂
© 2022
Caroline Dew, ICU Critical Care RN. Australia.
➲
❦ Note: ‘The 77 things I hated about what COVID did to the human body’ was written in anger by Caroline Dew as a retort to the disgraceful article that appeared in Australia’s Herald Sun ridiculing what Australian healthcare workers did to protect an unvaccinated population during the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic response.
The Herald Sun is a conservative daily Australian tabloid newspaper which is a subsidiary of News Corp Australia, itself a subsidiary of the Murdoch-owned News Corp.
‘The 77 things we hated about the Covid response’, published in October 2022 by the Herald Sun, Australia.
© 2022 Herald Sun / News Corp Australia / News Corp.
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