I’ve been working as a hospital chaplain for several years. It’s a unique job where almost every part of the hospital is open to me while the rest of those who work in the hospital stay in their primary locations. Because of this, the rest of our spiritual care team and I have an inside look at almost every aspect of what goes on in the hospital.
For the past week, no normal patient at the hospital I work at has been able to receive even a single visitor. Many of them feel like they are in prison and the other chaplains and I have been doing our best to check in with them to bring a friendly face to their lives who doesn’t want to poke or prod or check them in any way. The nurses on these floors don’t worry so much about catching COVID-19 from their patients, since many of the patients have been at the hospital long enough to have passed any isolation protocols.
Nurses and doctors who work in the emergency department (ED), however, are mostly masked all the time now. It’s a jarring sight that only really began a week ago. Before that, only those who don’t get flu shots would be masked. Now, it’s easily 80 percent of them are wearing PPE (personal protective equipment) all the time. This change alone increases the anxiety level of the department. But when you don’t know the exposure risk of your patients, you limit your own. And since every patient in the ED is a new admit, the exposure risk is at its highest here of the entire hospital. Still, there’s a team stationed at the entry to the ED (that wasn’t there before) which questions everyone who enters and checks their temperatures.
Emergency patients are the only ones allowed through those doors now. I used to enter through there, especially when on call and answering a trauma page in the night. But now, every caregiver has to enter through just one set of doors near the family birthing center. We’re all questioned about our travels and physical symptoms and then our temperatures are taken. It’s been quite cold lately, so I’ve had to have my temperature taken numerous times because my face was too cold. There’s a humorous irony there.
One of the departments that has been hardest hit by the coronavirus outbreak is our communications department. The phones are ringing off the hook like never before — and that’s no hyperbole. Because of the call volume, it’s common for callers to have to wait for an operator to answer their call which doesn’t make anyone happy. And so often people immediately start telling the operator about their symptoms, something the operator isn’t trained to evaluate. But even then, the operators can tell almost always that the symptoms the callers are worried about are not COVID-19 related. So, I encourage anyone who is going to call a hospital to be as nice as possible, to express their needs clearly and briefly, and to be patient while waiting. The switchboard is a thin point in the funnel right now and probably will be for a while.
The intensive care unit (ICU) is also on pins and needles. Generally, ICU patients have the largest number of visitors in the hospital because these are the highest risk patients and families and friends are the most on edge from concern about them. But just like the other floors, ICU patients can only receive visitors now if they are approaching end of life or are in crisis mode. So, even though the ICU waiting room is eerily empty now, there is a sense of people unhappy to not have access to their loved ones. Also, with reports of overrun ICUs in Italy and other harder hit areas of the world, there is a pressure on the ICU medical staff to get the current patients stabilized enough to move out of the unit to another floor, making room for potential coronavirus patients. And so the ICU is emptier now than since the wing was opened.
In fact, both ICU and ED are fairly empty currently. And rooms on the upper floors of the hospital have been vacated, sending patients to other care facilities as quickly as possible, knowing that an onslaught of coronavirus patients might be coming at any time. We know what the projections are and we simply don’t have enough space to handle what’s expected. So, we’re creating as much space as possible now in preparation for what might be.
We had a bit of a dry run in 2017 when we prepared to be overrun with people needing medical care because of the hordes projected to descend on Central Oregon because of the solar eclipse. That crisis turned out to be nothing, but it did tune up our health care system to be ready for the crisis we’re facing now.
So, we’re in the tense calm before the storm. There are fewer people coming into the ED with traumas, because there are fewer people out and about in their cars. The bars and restaurants are closed and there’s simply nothing to do at night. People aren’t shoveling snow or raking leaves, so there is less cardiac stress. Life is less busy and so in the ED.
Instead, what we’re seeing more of is mental and emotional and spiritual strain. As a chaplain, I usually spend most of my time with patients and their families. Now, I’m spending as much time taking care of stressed out caregivers as I am with patients.
Every person is grieving right now. Plans for trips have been canceled. Their sports teams have vanished. They have kids at home who are kinda happy they’re not at school but who are climbing the walls because they can’t hang out with friends. (And those kids are grieving the loss of their sports seasons and spring break adventures. Where 9/11 mostly hit adults and kids were blithely unaware of what was going on, coronavirus is hitting kids, disrupting their lives as much as the lives of adults.)
When I talk with nurses about their anxiety levels, they generally blow it off at first. Nurses became nurses in order to help other people, not because they wanted to be helped themselves. But when I start listing a number of the things that I’ve been dealing with in my own life (canceled trip to Texas, kids sports season, daughter back early from college, wife having to work online from home, canceled piano competition for my youngest, no March Madness, no church, and on and on), then they start opening up about all of the things that they have going on. All of it takes up mental and emotional space. And the reality is we only have so much space inside of us. When it gets filled up, it starts spilling out on others. And so I go around and get people to spill some of it safely on me.
One other thing. Along with being a chaplain and a pastor, I’ve also been a journalist, observing, asking questions, and writing regularly for the past three decades. I know what goes on in the journalism world too, and not all of it is pretty. Journalists aren’t experts on the topics they write about. Some may think they are, but they aren’t. They’re journalists, not practitioners. And some know next to nothing about it at all. As an editor, I often had to do some basic educating of my writers on subjects I assigned to them. On top of this, I’ve caught well-trained journalists manufacturing quotes from sources they didn’t speak with.
Doctors and nurses aren’t immune to bad information either.
I add this last part to remind you to pay close attention to your sources. In fact, I’d ignore 95 percent of what’s out there, even if it comes from reputable news sources. What you really want is what comes from the experts themselves. These are who I recommend:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center.
The World Health Organization.
And to bust myths: The Coronavirus Collection on Snopes.
Stay safe. Stay home as much as possible. Be nice. Share. Pray. Wash your hands (it’s more effective than sanitizer). Read a book. Call people on the phone or FaceTime/Skype. Relax. It may get harder and be quite painful at times, but this too shall pass.