By Tiffany Lai September 8, 2023
It was fall of 2020 and COVID was at the peak of it’s notariety. I had been working in the COVID ICU for several months now. My patient was an indian woman in her early 30s. She had just given birth a few months prior when she contracted COVID. She had been separated from her newborn baby for months while fighting for her life in the ICU. Medical personnel had to help her remove and throw away her breastmilk.
She was concerned about the outbreak of COVID in India, and flew her parents out to America before the travel ban was enforced. It turns out her parents already had COVID and infected the entire family. Understandably, she was unsure what the implications would be if she got vaccinated while pregnant so she declined the vaccine. She was the only person who was unvaccinated and the only one hospitalized.
She got it bad. She was placed on a ventilator, received a tracheostomy and had to be flipped upside down on a rotating hospital bed in order to save her life. The ICU of this particular hospital only initiated therapy once patients were off the ventilator and stable on trach mask so that is when I first met her.
She was so weak. Her muscles had wasted away and she could hardly sit up let alone stand. Her legs buckled under her weight. She was determined though. She needed to get back to her baby, she said. It took about a week of therapy and clearance that she was no longer contagious for her to go home with lots of assistance and followup therapy.
As a mom myself, I can’t imagine being separated from my newborn baby for such a long time. I can’t imagine the guilt her parents must have felt even though nothing was done purposefully.