Spokane Reporter Offers Insight Into Intensive Care Unit Treating COVID Patients

(File Photo by Nathan Howard / Getty Images)

There’s a lot of debate about COVID and vaccines, but it’s hard to discuss the reality in the intensive care unit (ICU) of any hospital, be it in Spokane, Washington, or across the county.

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A year and a half after the pandemic, some medical professionals are now letting journalists into local hospitals, desperate to get the word out, and desperately hoping we will hear how it is.

KXLY TV’s Robyn Nance shares a special report from the intensive care unit at the Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane.

“So we just got a woman in her early 70s from the emergency room. She waited 16 hours in the emergency room. And because we didn’t have a bed, we just got her up and she urgently needs to be intubated, which means that they put on a breathing tube to help her breathe, ”described one nurse.

At Sacred Heart there are 26 beds in the general medical and neurotraumatic intensive care unit and 28 in the cardiac intensive care unit. But the hospital now also has to use the cardiac intensive care unit for COVID patients.

The time has come that tough decisions have to be made about who gets the bed, when and why. There were also times, as one nurse said, when there is only one ventilator in the hospital and someone has to decide who gets it.

It is a group of providers and doctors, essentially a body, that make these decisions.

Additionally, nurses in Spokane say they have downsized and people are working 16 hours.

“You are physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted,” said one nurse. “It’s very draining. And we just want to have the feeling that things could get better. “

“It seems like people in the community still don’t believe this is real,” said another. “We see people dying here all the time.”

“The young people, the people with families, with lives like mine, who go to work every day and never go home to their children, their mothers and their dogs. And just knowing you’ve done everything and it wasn’t enough, ”said a Spokane nurse about the difficult parts of the job. “And at the end of the day you zip up and have to go home and try to pretend life is fine.”

However, another nurse in Spokane said the vaccine was hope. The more people vaccinated, the fewer patients there will be in the hospital.

There were also stories of Spokane and hospitals along the Idaho border now having to care for both Idaho and Washington patients. Idaho has no mask requirement.

“We have our own anti-masking and anti-vaccines here. Just because there’s a limit doesn’t mean it just stops at the limit, ”KXLY TV’s Robyn Nance said of Spokane. “It kind of depends on where you tune in and who you listen to – there is a fear that Washington needs the beds for Washingtonians. And that’s what the governor said when he asked Idaho to bring it together, neighbors, because we can’t take care of you. We have to take care of our own people. “

“Then, of course, Idaho went into crisis standards of care, which means there are so few beds there that they can’t take care of all of the people who need care there,” she added.

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Regarding the patients hospitalized in Spokane who are vaccinated or unvaccinated, Nance says not very many are vaccinated. The reporters asked directly, but of course Nance says the nurses and doctors don’t walk down the hall and say, “It is this person, it is not this person.”

“But they said they very rarely vaccinated people in their intensive care units,” she said.

Check out Nance’s full report on KXLY.com here.

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