Many of us haven’t been able to visit distant loved ones since COVID started its rampage around the world over two years ago. Our friend, Scott, was one of them; he missed his daughter, Kelly, who lives in California. Finally, she felt it was safe for her to come. Her father was vaccinated, she was vaccinated, and she got a test before her flight to be sure she didn’t bring any germs to him. While she was here, I had a very insightful visit with her.
Kelly Sievers is an ultrasound tech at the Corona Regional Hospital in Southern California. She’s loved the work, the hospital, her boss. The testing machine she operates is important for diagnosing medical problems: Are there blood clots in the veins of a person with leg discomfort? Does a person with abdominal pain need a gall bladder operation? Does the pregnant woman’s bloody discharge mean she is going to have a miscarriage? Sometimes the testing showed a serious condition, but usually the results showed something that could be taken care of and it was pleasant for Kelly to tell people the good results and see their relief and happiness. However, COVID has changed the joy and fulfillment her work gave her and she no longer looks forward to her work day.
Soon after the virus outbreak, the hospital filled with patients. The hospital has two ICU units; they designated one for COVID patients only, the other for patients with no COVID. Patients normally had private rooms, but several beds had to be crowded into each room to accommodate the vast number of infected people.
COVID causes blood clots and the ultrasound machine is the one that detects them. Clots need to be treated promptly. If a blood clot goes to the lungs, it can cause death. A patient may not have a clot one day and develop one the next, so they have to be tested and retested. Working with these patients became Kelly’s fulltime job, a very stressful job.
COVID patients were isolated and couldn’t be brought to a testing area, so Kelly had to bring her large portable machine to them. It’s on wheels so is fairly easy to push but was not easy to position beside a patient’s bed in a crowded room. She had to move other beds and the bedside tables out of the way, being careful not to disturb all the wires and tubes connected to the patients, then roll her machine into place.
Kelly’s heart was torn in two directions — for the patients and for catching the disease herself and bringing it to her family. COVID patients are alone, no visitors allowed. They are sick, scared and lonely. Kelly cares, “I feel for them. I talk to them while gathering their history and as I move the testing probe over their bodies. It calms them down when I hold their hands. I take off my gloves. They need to feel your skin, your warmth. It’s the best medicine. They know someone is helping them. It’s good not to be treated like a leper.”
Two years of COVID has been wearing on her. She said, “Before COVID, I’d occasionally deal with a dying person, but now everyone around me is dying. Some died while I was scanning them, even young healthy people my age. Recently a healthy 34-year-old man with no underlying health conditions came in because he was having trouble breathing. He was married and had two kids, same situation as me — same age, married with two kids. He was unvaccinated, said he never thought he’d get COVID. It’s worse than he thought it would be, thought the government was blowing it out of proportion, said he missed his wife and kids, wished he hadn’t worked so much, wished he’d spent more time with his family, wished he’d gotten vaccinated.” It was the kind of story Kelly heard over and over. She felt sad on the morning she came into work and saw his name on the list of patients who died during the night.
The toll of the job has transferred over to her family. Kelly said, “It’s hard not to take work home with me. It’s tolerable to deal with death once in awhile, but when it’s every day, it’s hard. I have nightmares. I dream about people dying. It haunts me — I see people rolling back their eyes and dying. It has affected me mentally and emotionally. I had a mental breakdown two times when the numbers were very high, last January and this January. I cried for three days and kept saying, “’I can’t do this, I can’t hear another Code Blue, I can’t watch dead bodies being rolled down the hallway.’ They were loaded into the freezer trucks outside. They load in 12 bodies, then take them to the mortuary.”
She said that on top of it all, she couldn’t get a dentist appointment because she was at high risk for bringing COVID to the office; also, her primary care doctor would only do a virtual visit. She said, “I felt black-balled because of my job.” The doctor did prescribe an anxiety medication that has given her some relief.
Presently, the hospital is short-staffed. Some workers quit their jobs because they refused to get vaccinated, and over 100 are out sick. She said, “All of my patients who died were unvaccinated. I didn’t see one vaccinated person die.”
Her story made me think that unvaccinated people would reconsider their decision not to get vaccinated if they realized how that decision not only puts their lives at risk, but greatly affects the lives of dedicated medical workers.
Carole Gariepy of Phillipston has written seven books, all nonfiction. A recent one is a travel book, “Why Go There?” In her younger years, she was a teacher.