Andrea DonAlexis
Yesterday at 7:52 AM ·
Last night I had to accept an ICU patient in transfer to an ER bed, because we had -2 ICU beds already. That means there were already 2 critically ill patients who should have been in the ICU instead of a holding pattern in the ER. Our ER nurses and our ICU nurses are all awesome, but they’re not interchangeable. You wouldn’t want a hand surgeon performing your breast augmentation, right? So likewise you don’t really want an ER nurse doing long term care for an ICU patient. Why did this happen? From what I was told, at that time there were NO available ICU beds in Birmingham, so the best this guy could do was a little ER room.
No available ICU beds in Birmingham. Think about that. Even if you’re following all the guidelines and manage to avoid getting COVID, you could still be totally screwed if you need an ICU bed for any other reason. We’re also having big problems getting people into psychiatric units and nursing homes because they all need a negative COVID test first, so they lay around in medical beds for 4-5 days waiting for their test results so they can go to the place they actually belong. And to make it even crappier, all area hospitals are having big staffing shortages. Nurses and other workers are getting sick and/or worked to the breaking point.
Think long and hard about why we’re in a worse place now than we were four months ago. Then think about how you can change those things. If you can avoid going to bars, beaches, parties, and restaurants, do it. If you can wear a mask in public, do it, even if you don’t want to and it offends your political sensibilities or masculinity. If you can be politically active so that our do-nothing politicians feel the heat and actually start mustering the resources of our state and federal governments to make the situation better, do it. The reason government exists is to tackle problems that are too big for us to solve as individuals or groups of citizens. This pandemic is one of those things.
We left it up to individuals and we’re failing miserably. How much longer do you want to suffer and live in fear and denial? We need more testing, faster testing, contact tracing, global masking, PPE, and hazard pay. We need to close the places the virus is being spread in again. We’re already on fire y’all.