UK HealthCare: Voices from the Front LInes скачать в хорошем качестве

UK HealthCare: Voices from the Front LInes

For more information, visit https://ukhealthcare.uky.edu/voices. Transcript: UK is busy in general. We get the outlying counties, we see their sick moms, they come here. We care for them and for their high risk pregnancies, deliveries, things like that. So we were busy. And then we had our nice, normal, healthy pregnancies on top of that. And since then, it's changed things. Life has definitely changed. Even with the original COVID-19, we were seeing a lot of adults and very few children. But now with this Delta variant, we are seeing a high influx of kids that are normally healthy, that are, unfortunately, getting hit really hard with this. Not only seeing an increase in the Delta variant, we've seen an increase in RSV. And I guess the theory is that so many kids were kept out of the public, the malls, the parties. I always blame the mall Santa Claus lap that they set them on. But now we are definitely seeing an increase and they're more severe than we have seen before. This wave, we've had quite a few more moms. And some moms come in asymptomatic, but we've had quite a few more very sick moms in the ICU. And we've had deliveries early, and then complications with deliveries and stuff related to how sick moms were from the COVID infection. So yeah, it's quite a bit different this time. Yeah. I think the other day, half of my assignment, the patients, were born to COVID-positive mothers. And it was just kind of shocking how dramatically it's changed. We're having higher acuity levels. Which when you have higher acuity levels, you usually have more nurses. But with having short staff and higher acuity levels, you're basically giving it your all. You almost feel like you're running in circles, more or less, because it's just busy. It's very busy. We are seeing a wide influx. We are seeing neonates down in the neonatal ICU that were just born that, unfortunately, their mom was positive, and then they ended up being positive. We're also seeing neonates upstairs in the pediatric ICU that are one-month-old. We're seeing that age range all the way to 19-year-olds or 18-year-olds that are previously healthy that, unfortunately, are sick with COVID, and then their interventions are ranging from just a little bit of oxygen to requiring intubation. We're seeing everything. In a lot of situations when the mothers have COVID, we can't allow them to come into the NICU where we have so many incredibly ill and very delicate infants who they would not survive contracting COVID. There are situations where we have infants who are here that we're taking care of them, and their mothers are unable to visit on the scale of weeks. In other situations that are more severe, we have mothers who are so sick with COVID that they're on a ventilator, a breathing tube, they're unconscious from sedation. We have to deliver their babies because they're so medically unwell, our OB team does. And then we're taking care of those babies where we'll have a baby here who we're taking care of for their prematurity, they're in severe condition, and then their mother's also in the ICU, and has never even gotten to see her child. We don't want to deliver earlier, but sometimes we have to because mom's not getting enough oxygen circulating, and baby's not getting enough. It comes down to that oxygen exchange and the gas exchange that occurs through the placenta into the baby. And both are affected. So it's serious. A lot of these moms, the sickest moms we are seeing are young, healthy otherwise, and they're just pregnant. And then they contract COVID and are unvaccinated. And they are the sickest patients this hospital is seeing at times. Not only are we having an influx with COVID-positive patients, but we're also seeing a lot of respiratory patients with our normal respiratory season early. So not only are we having these COVID-positive patients come in, but we're having kids that are sick with RSV and bronchiolitis on top of trauma. It's scary when you have a trauma come in when you're trying to figure out, they're sick, but how sick are they really because we need a room for this trauma. But on the positive side of that, I work with some amazing, selfless, the hardest-working coworkers-- and to be honest, I don't think that I would be standing here if it wasn't for them, because it is very scary. But when you have them bedside with you, you know that it's going to be OK. Our staff, they're also people. So we have older staff, staff that work with us or people with other underlying conditions, other women who are pregnant themselves who are taking care of babies. But when we have infants who are born to mothers with COVID but the infant requires NICU care, we're taking care of these babies. But know we're going in in all of our full PPE trying to make sure for our own health we don't catch COVID.