Neelam N. August 2020
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My phone calls consisted of “I'm sorry about your mom she is not doing well. I'm sorry, but your dad is not doing well. I'm sorry”.
I'm a nurse practitioner. I work in a hospital on the palliative care team, anybody who comes in with a really serious illness like COVID is referred to my team. And the the conversations I have with them are, “What are your advanced directives, do you want to be resuscitated? Do you want to be intubated?” These were young people, healthy people and in the beginning we really didn't know what we were doing. We were intubating them pretty rapidly and people were dying. I had a whole family, mother, husband, grandmother, grandfather, uncle, all intubated. The mother made it, the grandmother made it, the uncle and the father didn’t, they died alone.
The beds were all filled. We had couple of floors turned into of COVID units. We had to open up an additional ICU just for COVID. We put a tent outside for COVID testing.
That was my March and April. I would be the only one on the Merritt Parkway going to work. For miles I wouldn't see another car.
Then we started treating people with the plasma, people started recovering. It really was a game changer.
