Inside the ICU: An exclusive look inside Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center's intensive care

we begin a with a four news now special report what our community needs to see tonight for the first time ever with this kind of access our cameras go inside the icu at sacred heart medical center where caregivers are battling a pandemic and trying to save lives good evening i'm nia wong and i'm erin luna for those unsure about how serious covet is in our community it's time to see with your own eyes it's a story we never thought we'd be able to tell if you'd asked me to do this two years ago i would have said oh my gosh we would never let cameras in our critical care units but as you said we're in different times we are in unprecedented times tonight seeing is believing as our cameras visited the icu for a snapshot in time so we can show you what's happening in real time before we go inside the icu we want you to know a couple of things first we did not go inside patient rooms our staff was massed up and did not interfere with patient care and providence screened all of our video before it aired not to change content or messaging but to ensure that no private patient information is shared knowing all that here's robin nance well we like other news agencies have been asking for this kind of access since the beginning of the pandemic and i think the medical community has just had enough the doctors the nurses the entire hospital staff are desperate for everyone especially those who aren't taking covet seriously to understand just how dire it is particularly in the icu photojournalist brian belanger and i were allowed inside for a few hours and here is what we saw no chess tubes is that right art lines undone we arrived just before 11 in the morning and started recording all right this team of nurses and a respiratory therapist make up the prone team at 11 o'clock they get started it's right over here it's their job to turn covet patients onto their stomachs these patients are unconscious on ventilators unable to breathe on their own they are completely helpless i think easiest way to flip her is going to be to bring her up towards me and then flip her onto her stomach towards the vent that'll take care of the lines and so what we're trying to do by pruning someone is recruit those of you like to be able to auctionate better and just kind of open things up as much as possible one two three i got this if you want to get the pop before everyone leaves we'll have to get her on pillows we're not going to be able to sling her of course because we're [Music] have no supplies you saw an entire team of specialists flip a patient onto their stomach to help them breathe that's something that hadn't been done before maybe four or five times a year since covet it's happening multiple times a day back the other way it was nurse hannah rostrom's voice you were hearing directing the prone team it's incredibly labor intensive they stay prone for about 16 hours so she'll stay in that position for 16 hours unprone for the the rest of the eight and then do it again it takes this team 20 minutes to get the patient in the proper position once she's stable they strip off their gear sanitize go to another patient and start all over again you know and it's really your your last stitch effort to try to save someone's life okay so first we're going to go up to this corner and then we're going to go up on this side and then on his belly ending up facing this way right outside this room a hospital bed is real down the hall sure so we just brought a woman in her early 70s up from the emergency room she had been waiting in the emergency room for 16 hours and because we didn't have a bed available we just now got her up and she has to be emergently intubated meaning they're going to put in a breathing tube to help her breathe deb gillette has been a nurse for nine years and is the icu nurse manager for the past 18 months she's led a team through the unimaginable so we have 54 beds for adult critical care at sacred heart 26 are in our general medical neuro-trauma icu and 28 are in our cardiac icu but we have had to use the cardiac icu beds also for covet patients these are the sickest of covet patients their bodies shutting down there are two other floors at sacred heart dedicated to covet patients who are not this sick and not needing ventilators and some of these rooms were already ready with ventilators but you've had to create rooms or make shift rooms sure so some all of our beds have capability to have ventilators in them but we only had four negative airflow rooms and so we used those special isolation rooms to prevent those infectious agents from spreading special fans and hepa filters used in negative airflow rooms act as a vacuum not allowing potential contaminated air from leaving the room you can hear the suction when the doors open if more patients need the negative flow rooms the hospital may have to reconfigure certain wings of the hospital and bring in equipment it doesn't currently have we reached a point i believe it was two weeks ago or maybe it was last week we had one bed left on the entire second floor that was a negative airflow now upstairs on some of our medical floors we have patients that would have met icu criteria weeks ago right they're maxed out on the settings and all that they can do upstairs they would have been brought down already so then you reach a very difficult decision right who comes down who gets the bed when and why right we also reached a situation where we were left to one ventilator in the hospital so then again who gets the vent right who makes those difficult decisions a group of providers jeremy says he's just glad he isn't one of them keeping these rooms and this unit staffed is deb's job she's working with caregivers who are pushed to their limits more than ever today we were short maybe nine critical care nurses to start we've had staff here for 16 hours they are exhausted physically mentally emotionally it's very draining and we just want to feel like it could get better you can hear that exhaustion and frustration in the voices of these nurses jeremy malavey seems like in the community people are still not believing that this is real we see people die all the time here emily cruz it's hard i'm it it makes you sad it makes you mad but sometimes it makes you just feel numb and eric custer that's really hard when you're doing a zoom meeting with 15 people and they're watching their loved one pass away these three love their jobs as icu nurses but are starting to lose hope statistics are horrible you know if you're intubated with cova your chances of survival are very very small and the young people the people with families with lives like my own who went to work every day and are never gonna go home to their kids their moms and their dogs and just knowing that you did everything and it wasn't enough and then at the end of the day you zip up the bag and you have to go home and try to pretend life's okay life is not okay for those working tirelessly short staffed dealing with so much loss i came home absolutely exhausted my wife's asking me as i'm trying to fall asleep how my day was right uh that's why i honestly just broke down a little bit and just relayed to her how the end of my day was ended my day putting two patients in body bags right and the family of one of these patients still didn't believe that this was real remember early on in the pandemic when the community rallied around first responders treating them as heroes it's a much different situation today i think that it was well intended but it ended up creating this sort of these are heroes nurses signed up for this they want to be heroes and it kind of diminishes the fact that we're all just human and i'd like to the same as anyone else in the world go to my job and then go home going home finding peace our nurses try to release the pain of the job you're there for families at the hardest point you know and and so you're that bridge for them to either get to say goodbye to their loved ones or be a part of that and it's it's an honor it's a blessing and it's and it's heart-wrenching all rolled into one it makes you go home and grab your kids that much tighter tell your wife you love her that much more enjoy ice cream as each of these nurses tries to grapple with what goes on inside the icu they also have different feelings about what happens outside these walls outside the hospital biggest part of that frustration is people not following the science right not believing in the medical community is actually trying our best to give these patients a fighting chance we're really trying here and the best thing our community can do is get vaccinated we really have nothing else that's kind of our that's our only solution and the more that people do that the less time we'll spend in here and the less time i'll spend at home thinking about these people who are never going to go home i'm here to help you in the hardest moments of your life that's what i'm here for and everything that's happened before then is on you really the vaccine is our hope the more people that get vaccinated the less patients that we have in the hospital we spent three hours in the icu a snapshot in time really as compassionate professionals were doing everything they could to save lives and as our camera was rolling um the vast majority of our patients today are in their 30s to 60s there is hope there is we just had a the chimes are going off we just had a baby born a true testament to what happens on a daily basis in our hospitals death and life and when we were in the icu last tuesday there were 17 covet patients in the icu being treated there as of today we just got this uh these numbers three of them have improved and were transferred to medical units two have been extubated um but they are still in the icu that means taking off the ventilators um nine remain intubated in the icu and three have died that's our that's that's hard to hear that's reality as a journalist robin you are immersed in this story you've covered the numbers you hear reports from reporters on scene talking to doctors but how has this changed your perspective going in there yourself as we've been saying seeing is believing and you want to believe the things that you're being told by professionals and and the people who have the numbers but when you see what goes on there for yourself with your own eyes it changes it just everything is so real now and it really was to me before but but seeing and then talking to the nurses who were just so you felt it it's moving overloaded yeah yeah and we've been getting so much response to this story yeah yeah even before it aired but i will say um most interestingly just a couple of hours ago i received an email from jeremy the nurse who you saw in the story he's trying to reach a former patient a woman and her mother both came in with coveted recently very very sick both were intubated after some time the daughter improved was moved to another unit then was later released but her mom did not survive and her last words to jeremy were tell my daughter that i love her he was not able to do that it is weighing so heavily on him he just wants the daughter to know what her mother said so hopefully if you've seen this or you know the family you can help spread the word and um get those they get that message to the daughter wow very powerful and we have even more coverage of robin's time inside the icu just head over to kxly dot com slash inside dash the dash icu where you can see photo galleries and so much more

Channel: 4 News Now

Views: 241,454

Rating: 4.7668066 out of 5

Keywords: coronavirus, covid, health, inside-the-icu, intensive-care-unit, nurse, providence, sacred-heart-medical-center, top-stories, vaccine, spokane news, inside the icu, kxly, covid updates, Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center

Id: sJcE6DGkAvg

Length: 12min 39sec (759 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 15 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/dausy]

Part they havent touched on yet.

We are running out of medical staff, which is mentioned but not the issue it causes. I can only speak on the end of nurses but theyre so short on icu nurses that now they're pulling anybody with an active license to be an icu nurse.

This is hard to explain to non medical people but nurses are specialized too. Its like pulling somebody off orthopedics to deliver a baby. We dont know wtf is normal in a baby or pregnant woman. But this is what theyre doing pulling nurses from places like presurgery testing to work in icu. If you had a family member that close to death that they need to be in icu and your nurse is like "lol...I dont know what that monitor is for..or what these meds are for...why is this button here?" Thats f---ing scary.

[u/tunafresh]

I’m an RN from Florida. We’ve gone through all this already; floor conversions, closing services and allocating to covid floors, news coverage, etc.

People don’t care. I’ve had numerous conversations with people to get vaccinated. Even my family. Everyone is suddenly an expert in all-things healthcare.

I still try to educate people on vaccines, but leaving it to Mother Nature for those who don’t want to listen.

I’m tired.

[u/_-_Missy_-_]

My beloved sister and her husband are both RNs in this particular ICU, they are being ran into the ground emotionally, physically, and mentally. Many are just just becoming numb and/or developing PTSD from the massive amount of human suffering and death they have witnessed. Enduring wave after wave of a preventable situation takes a toll. I work as a nurse practitioner in family practice and I'm just fed up, tired of people arguing with me, spouting off reams of lies and misinformation. I see people coming in for a follow-up post 25 day stay in the hospital with covid, acute respiratory failure, pneumonia.....and many still won't consider the vaccine. All I feel is frustration and anger.

[u/maltman1856]

My wife and I jokingly said at the beginning of the pandemic that she (ICU charge nurse for 6 yeras) would probably have some type of PTSD from the pandemic. I never thought I would see her breaking down like this. Our neighbor is a 48 year old ICU nurse and I see him often crying while smoking cigs outside after his shift. He didn't smoke pre-pandemic. The situation at our ICU is so beyond what people thought was possible.

[u/LuckyPlaze]

This should have been a staple of every news channel since COVID hit. Attitudes would be much different. Show it. Just like Vietnam. Bombard America with the true story.

[u/thatladydoctor]

I'm not sure why I watched the whole thing after a 14hr overnight ICU shift. I think I just feel seen, and I appreciate this news crew for sharing how dire it really is. Please, for the love of God, get vaccinated.

[u/HAS-A-HUGE-PENIS]

It's really no joke. I'm infuriated with anyone still attempting to downplay covid. I'm vaccinated, healthy, active, in my 30s and tested positive a couple weeks ago. I had a horrible time with it, from days of fever and being completely out of it to be so tired but unable to sleep for more than a couple hours because I kept waking up unable to breathe. Lost my taste, smell and my voice from coughing so much. Only this week am I starting to feel somewhat normal again.I am convinced that if I had not been vaccinated I would have absolutely been hospitalized.

[u/thalachanar]

My parents work together in the same hospital. My dad is a surgeon and my mom is a nurse. Both of them work insane shifts with ICU beds, the emergency room, and most other beds in the hospital completely filled. Every time I call my mom to check in, she just talks about how frustrating it is for this to be her daily reality and then go to an extended family gathering and hear her own family (who recently lost my uncle to covid) talk about how covid is a “hoax” and false information about the vaccines.

My dad has luckily been able to convince the most level-headed of our extended family of the reality of the situation, even resulting in some of them being vaccinated. It’s just crazy to me that people can be in the midst of a pandemic, with some of their own family and friends being affected by it, and still think it’s fake.

[u/BelCantoTenor]

As a nurse, I fully support this. The public needs to know. We need to do whatever we can to de-politicize this pandemic and make people understand that this is REAL. 1:500 Americans have died of COVID. That’s over 600,000 people. It’s time to wake up to reality and work together to stop this pandemic. We all need to act responsibly and get vaccinated and wear your goddamn masks.