Doctor in COVID battle recalls the heartbreak and hope of early pandemic.
More Americans died in two years of the COVID-19 pandemic than in 40 years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.The sound of construction around Cedars-Sinai Marina del Rey Hospital is hard to miss. Crews are essentially building a new hospital because the old one, just south of Los Angeles, isn’t big enough. For the staff, it is a sign of rebirth after an exhausting two years.
The staff remembers the early months when there was no test for the virus and treatments were extremely limited. Their colleagues were getting seriously ill. Patients were streaming in unable to catch their breath. “The last two years have been the most challenging time for anyone, certainly in my generation, in pulmonary and critical care medicine,” he said. “In some sense when we all look back at it, it’s like being in an alternate universe. I don’t think any of us ever saw so many patients coming in with such a volume of one particular disease. And certainly none of us ever saw the health care system so impacted and so overwhelmed.
“It was definitely scary,” Roverud remembered. “A lot of the times I felt like: ‘How can I do this?’ But I think with the teamwork aspect here at [Cedars-Sinai] Marina del Rey and the friendships that you form with the staff and other leadership it just makes everything easier.” Friedman said he knew the wave of death that he witnessed in New York was likely heading to California and elsewhere. He was right. The halls at Cedars-Sinai Marina del Rey became full during several waves of the pandemic. The sound of ventilators pumping air into patients’ lungs filled the hallways. COVID-19 was killing Americans.
Friedman said after the first surge, medical staff could feel that the general population wanted to move on from the virus but the virus was not done with Americans. “It made our jobs that much more difficult. It felt like you were fighting a war, but when you returned home from the battle people just simply didn’t believe that war was even occurring,” he said.
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