I Didn ’t Want to Push My Aunt to Get the Vaccine. Now I Live With Regrets

In normal times, the ICU is a dreadful place. Sickness lingers like a fog. You can feel it, sense it, even hear it—the machinery pumping, the alarms ringing, the nurses scrambling. In pandemic times, the ICU is chilling. Death lives here. Medical staff members wear green biohazard suits, face shields, latex gloves and shoe coverings. Strips of red tape—“ISOLATION,” they read—mark the windows and doors of individual rooms. Behind each is a patient who cannot breathe on their own, kept alive by a ventilation machine that is connected to an invasive tube running down their windpipe and into the lungs. Each room is almost identical: a person, some on their stomachs and others on their backs, sedated and paralyzed, roughly a dozen patches and pipes protruding from them, blankets hiding their naked bodies. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Most of them will not make it out of here, the nurse tells me. In fact, at this particular ICU on the Southern Gulf Coast, COVID-19 patients needing a ventilator have a fatality rate approaching 100%. Over the last year, hundreds of them spent time here. Seven of them survived. “I wish people could walk in my shoes for a day,” the nurse muffles through a mask. The nurse is nice, but blunt. She’s frustrated like so many in the medical community, she says. In this ICU, there are 25 patients battling COVID-19. She pauses before finishing the thought: 24 of them are unvaccinated. That include...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: news