“it is definitely not comfortable,” the veteran respiratory therapist at royal columbian hospital said. “i mean, just imagine.
patients need to be intubated and hooked up to a ventilator when they are unable to breathe without assistance. so when the virus that causes covid-19 aggressively targets the respiratory system, some patients need mechanical ventilation to keep their lungs going.
advertisement
in what we now look back on as normal times, it was already heartbreaking to see people suffer through intubation : smokers, people with chronic respiratory illness, patients needing resuscitation or under anesthesia.
“i can understand there are various reasons people wouldn’t want to get vaccinated, but it’s hard from this side of things, seeing all we see, to fathom the idea that someone would rather, you know, that than get a vaccine.”
advertisement
her phone bings non-stop with notices of extra shifts. even staff from outside the region have covered shifts in the fraser health authority’s jurisdiction.
advertisement
chau and her colleagues have quit watching the news because it would rile them up. the anti-vax protest outside of vancouver general hospital in september, “was, for lack of a better term, a big kick in the you-know-where,” she said.