Wednesday, March 25, 2020

This Is Not The Flu

A healthcare worker speaks out. To die of coronavirus sounds like a slow drowning. May God deliver us. From ProPublica:
“With our coronavirus patients, once they’re on ventilators, most need about the highest settings that we can do. About 90% oxygen, and 16 of PEEP, positive end-expiratory pressure, which keeps the lung inflated. This is nearly as high as I’ve ever seen. The level we’re at means we are running out of options.
“In my experience, this severity of ARDS is usually more typical of someone who has a near drowning experience — they have a bunch of dirty water in their lungs — or people who inhale caustic gas. Especially for it to have such an acute onset like that. I’ve never seen a microorganism or an infectious process cause such acute damage to the lungs so rapidly. That was what really shocked me.”
“It first struck me how different it was when I saw my first coronavirus patient go bad. I was like, Holy shit, this is not the flu. Watching this relatively young guy, gasping for air, pink frothy secretions coming out of his tube and out of his mouth. The ventilator should have been doing the work of breathing but he was still gasping for air, moving his mouth, moving his body, struggling. We had to restrain him. With all the coronavirus patients, we’ve had to restrain them. They really hyperventilate, really struggle to breathe. When you’re in that mindstate of struggling to breathe and delirious with fever, you don’t know when someone is trying to help you, so you’ll try to rip the breathing tube out because you feel it is choking you, but you are drowning. (Read more.)
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5 comments:

May said...

Thank God most patients are surviving, but it is genuinely frightening the way this can suddenly take such a horrific turn. Must trust totally in the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Hope you and your family are safe and well.

elena maria vidal said...

Thank you, my dear, and I hope the same for you.

julygirl said...

This is a case where the solution will be worse than the problem....small business bankruptcies, financial losses in major businesses, mortgage defaults, rise in child abuse and domestic violence from 'sheltering' at home, and an unprecedent disaster in all areas....when in the past, diseases which caused more deaths were not even a blip in the daily life and workings of this Country. This over-reaction promoted by the media raises suspicions in my mind.

elena maria vidal said...

I agree, julygirl.

May said...

Thank you Elena.

I agree that the way the media has been reporting this is often emotionally manipulative - as if they are deliberately spreading panic. And of course, the bottom line is, everything has to be turned into a way to somehow blame Trump.

I don't doubt this illness can be terrible as I said above and some medical services are getting overwhelmed but I also suspect something is skewed somewhere. We can't even assess the real statistical danger to the average person from this, with so little testing until recently and probably many unreported cases. Yet it seems the worst case scenario is always being presented, with lots of horror stories in the headlines.