Houston: A 46-year-old man who survived two tours on duty in Afghanistan, has died of complications from gallstones, deteriorating slowly, in Texas, overwhelmed by people who suffer from the Delta variant of Coronavirus.
Daniel Wilkinson lives only 90 minutes by car or 30 minutes with a helicopter from Houston, famous at the top hospital.
In this rich state of Texas, 14,700 people were hospitalized on September 1, just below the record set in January as a wave of winter covid brought havoc throughout America.
“In a previous surge, we saved a little more than 750 patients.
At present we have run between 820 and 850 patients, so the hospital is quite full,” said Roberta Schwartz, Deputy Executive of the Houston Methodist Hospital.
Everything is very bad so the conference room at one of the facilities is used to care for patients.
So rural health facilities are forced to keep patients, they are not equipped to care – like Wilkinson.
He was accepted on August 21 to the only hospital in his county, a block from his house in the city of Bellville, whose population was 4,000.
The hospital does not have equipment to lift gallstones, so try to arrange transfers with helicopters to other hospitals.
“Our staff and doctors work without stopping for more than six hours to make it move to a tertiary care center anywhere,” said Daniel Bonk, CEO of Bellville Medical Center.
“Our emergency room doctor at that time actually went to Facebook trying to make him transferred,” Bonk said.
The doctor near the capital of Texas Austin offered to take Wilkinson, then called back five minutes later to say there was no room in his hospital.
“We got several calls every day from the leaders of rural hospitals who panicked to find a place to send these patients,” said John Henderson, President of the Texas organization of a rural hospital and the community.
Texas Sprawling has 158 facilities like that, more than other US states.
He said Wilkinson’s case was not isolated.
“I would say every Sunday we have a situation that doesn’t end well and causes the death of the patient,” said Henderson.
The hospital staff felt helpless and overwhelmed by panic search for beds somewhere bigger and more complete.
“We ‘lose’ nurse basically every day, because the nurse must call all hospitals in the surrounding area to prove that we have a thorough test to get it elsewhere,” said Renee Poulter who manages nursing staff at the Bellville Hospital.
“And it takes hours, for hours if not all day spend calling every hospital in a great Texas state to see if anyone will accept your patient,” he added.
Bellville facilities are not designed to have an intensive care unit, but like many, because of the need, it must form one.
“We have critical and positive covid patients in our country facilities that we have cared for 11 days because we cannot find a higher level of care,” Poulter said.
To help them, Texas provides uber-busy rustic hospitals with respirators, oxygen and other ways to stabilize their patients.
It also carries nurses from other states.
The two such helps appeared last week in Bellville, one came from Pennsylvania and the others from Alabama, each working six shifts per week.
In one of the hospital rooms, a 72-year-old local woman named Carmella finished eating while her husband looked after her company, a day after she had a heart attack.
“They did jump and do as much as possible, but they just flooded.
They tried to move me.
I heard some phone calls.
And no one will take me,” Carmella said who did not give her last name.
.
“This is a sad situation.” Carmella finally got better and could go home.
Others are not lucky.