2 minute read
100s of Lights
100s of Lights for the 100s of Deaths, 100s of Survivors, and 100s of Heroes of COVID!
Mark B. Woodland, MS, MD, FACOG Chair OB/GYN, Reading Hospital – Tower Health, Academic Chair OB/GYN, Drexel University College of Medicine Chair, PA State Board of Medicine
Good morning,
We are your nurses, your facility persons, your lab technicians, your doctors, your pharmacists, your food service persons, your hospital administrators, your spiritual leaders. We will take care of you. We are sorry that you cannot come with them, but we will take care of them. There are so many people, but we will be right back. We need supplies; Wear your PPE! We need help in this room, they are not going to make it. We need to call their family. We are so sorry; we did everything we could for them. We were with them when they passed.
Pause! Good evening,
Repeat!
Written in April 2021, in response to the pandemic and the 100s of experiences we as frontline healthcare responders had in dealing with crisis in healthcare facilities and in our own personal lives at home.
Reading Hospital’s Spring 2021 COVID Candlelight Memorial 19
FUTURES
Rebecca Brown, DO Hematology/Oncology Fellow Reading Hospital – Tower Health
The room was familiar, although it was the first time I was stepping inside. I was struck by her sparkling oval ring, incongruous in the hospital fluorescence. I wondered if she ever thought she would be here. This was not the story she agreed to the day he asked, the day she said “Yes.” She looked up expectantly, and I knew I could do nothing but let her down.
I had spent the past ten months trying desperately to escape those ICU rooms in the sunny hallways of the outpatient office. I learned new aspects of medicine to drown out the sounds of the ventilator that I could still hear with my eyes closed in my dark bedroom. I still felt blood on the bridge of my nose even though the sores healed months ago. An afternoon came to mind during which I sat at a family meeting and said, somewhat abstractly, “Our dads have the same name”. I wondered how many 57-year-old Thomases were lying prone in ICUs, and how many daughters sat staring blankly when terminal extubation was gently encouraged. It was a suggestion that didn’t make sense until they stood outside the glass door and watched as we gingerly bandaged necrotic toes and tried to sop up the anticoagulation-induced epistaxis. In a recurring nightmare, it became my own father’s face upturned towards the ICU ceiling, and me outside the door, pounding
