She Was Flown Hundreds Of Miles To The Nearest Hospital That Could Handle Her COVID Case. She?s Not Alone.

Ao continuar com a navegação em nosso site, você aceita o uso de cookies.Rural hospitals are overwhelmed by the coronavirus, causing patients to be flown hundreds of miles from their homes to get care.By The next day she was at a hospital in North Dakota, a nearly 300-mile drive from her family.“‘How the fuck am I gonna get home?’” Cheri’s daughter, Erica Balcerek, said her mom told her over the phone from the hospital, laughing between labored breaths. A spokesperson for Essentia Health said in an email that the hospital saw an uptick in patients from “outside our normal service area,” and experts on rural hospitals and public health in the Midwest said many hospitals in the region have been significantly overwhelmed.Rural hospitals often have a small staff, limited beds, and limited resources. Although new cases and the number of hospitalized patients have declined across the region, what happened in the Midwest last month is a dire warning for other rural parts of the country where the virus is continuing to spread.“In such a rural area, with so much open air space, where you know everyone and what they’re up to, people here kind of think we’re invincible, which we’re not,” said Jeff, Cheri’s husband. “To the point where I got a hold of my ex-pastor, even though she is now retired.”Devin is a calibration technician, meaning, by his own definition, that his job is to “make sure things measure what they’re supposed to measure.” He’s been working through most of the pandemic, traveling to factories and workplaces all over the country, working in enclosed spaces with different people, often not wearing a mask.“Originally I was like, Let people make their own decisions,” Devin said, explaining that he saw the way the pandemic was ravaging small businesses, like the paintball business he runs in the summer. They made an exception to the no-visitors rule most hospitals have adopted during the pandemic, and allowed Jeff to come and sit with his wife before they strapped her to transportable oxygen machines and drove her to the airport.“After she got settled in Fargo, the nurse that was taking care of her that day called me and said, ‘If you don’t hear from us that’s good, but I also might be contacting you for some face time with her,’” Jeff said, taking in a sharp breath. “That really set me off, you know — that would mean that they were gonna take her into the ICU, put her on a ventilator, and of course, I didn’t even want to think about what that meant.”There, her husband said, she was given an experimental convalescent plasma therapy treatment — in which blood from people with COVID-19 antibodies is reduced to plasma and given to patients with severe cases in the hopes it will help fight the virus, and the FDA-approved drug remdesivir.For a while, Cheri wasn’t sure how she would get home.