Jeff, ICU Coordinator, Westchester County
By Jim Allen
Shift Change tells the stories of ordinary people on the frontlines during a transformational period in American life. The goal of this project is to raise funds for Supply Drop Brooklyn, a charitable organization that partners with local restaurants to deliver meals to healthcare workers at affected hospitals. Your help can make a critical difference. Please visit Supply Drop and learn how you can make a contribution. For more information about this project, check out our About page.
Jeff is an ICU coordinator in Westchester County, New York. This is his story.
What are your duties at your hospital?
I’m the unit coordinator in the ICU — I’m sort of like air traffic control for the unit. I do a lot of speaking to families who call in who want to know how their loved ones are, because right now there’s no visiting. I handle all of the supplies coming in and out of the ICU. I’m organizing all the new people we have.
What are your hopes for today and the future?
In the short term I think we’re looking at reducing admissions, because we’re pretty maxed out. Long term we need to figure out what we’re doing with the patients that we now have on ventilators. You can stay on a ventilator forever essentially, and you’ll stay alive until we turn it off — unless the family says, “We’ve seen where this is headed, we know what life looks like for grandpa, we maybe think we should compassionately extubate.” But we don’t have a lot of patients that are that age. We have younger patients, so it’s really hard to have that conversation about somebody who’s in their 30s and you’re talking to their parents.
How has your life changed since the coronavirus struck?
Our lives haven’t changed a whole lot. We still go to work every day and our kids still go to school, except that they do it in their rooms. We don’t really worry that much about bringing it home; [my wife and I] have both been dealing with it in the hospital for a month now.
At the hospital we’ve had mandatory regular surgical masks for every single staff member when you walk in the door. If you’ve got your mouth and nose covered, even if you’re positive and asymptomatic and you cough, it’s pretty difficult to transmit it when everyone is masked the same way. I feel safer at the hospital than I do at the grocery store, where some yahoo sneezes on me and I don’t know anything about them and they’re not making any effort to cover their mouth.
How has this changed your view of your profession, and your larger community?
It’s been a really good team-building exercise for the hospital. The ICU unit has really pulled together well under the pressure. Everybody’s pitching in. The community has been amazing. All the local first responders all came and lined the entire driveway of the hospital with the ladders up and flags and signs and cheered every single person who came in for their night shift at 7:00. It was overwhelming, in a good way.
A relative of one of our staff members started a GoFundMe page and she raised three times what she thought she could raise and she’s been providing lunch and dinner for the ICU every day. We have a separate entrance at the hospital with a table inside the door and the community just drops stuff off. We’re keeping a list of all the places that have done that for us, so we can give the list to the staff and say, “Look, when these places reopen, go there and support them.”
What misconceptions would you like to correct?
A lot of people have been saying, “Are they testing people that work in the hospital?” And when I say no, people are appalled. Say we have a thousand people that work at the hospital. If you tested everybody, my guess would be that 50 percent would probably test positive. What, you send them home? You can’t really do that. So it doesn’t really do any good to test people for it. Everybody wears a mask, everybody’s taking precautions. If I’m positive and I’m asymptomatic and I’m wearing a mask and I’m not coughing on anybody it’s really difficult to transmit. Washing your hands all the time and cleaning off surfaces and keeping your mouth covered does a lot.
The other thing is, I think it’s misleading to talk about numbers. “This many people tested positive.” Well, we sent home 15 people yesterday. Our hospital now plays a clip of “Here Comes the Sun” every time we discharge a COVID-positive patient. Yesterday I heard them play it at least 15 times. I had 24 patients in the ICU, yes, but we’ve sent several hundred people home just from the ER. I think we’ve admitted a couple of hundred people, and more than 60 percent of those people have gone home. I don’t think people are focusing on that enough. I feel like people are focusing on the negative a little too much.
What music have you been listening to?
This morning I was listening to that Henry Rollins ultra-long podcast that he put together [The Cool Quarantine]. I’m also trying to make an effort to buy from local bands, buy Bandcamp stuff. Last night I bought an album by a band called Spell; it’s a three-piece ‘70s-style traditional metal/proggy kind of band. The album is called Opulent Decay. I got the [Frank Zappa] Hot Rats box set for Christmas, so I’ve been listening to that a lot. A combination of comfort music, too. Yesterday was Sugar and Fishbone and Hüsker Dü, this morning was all Joni Mitchell.
