An Alberta doctor is sharing a snapshot in the life of caring for COVID-19 patients, as the virus continues to sweep across the province in record numbers.
“I wanted people to know that we are seeing it — and we’re not only seeing it, but it’s so different than what we’ve ever seen or dealt with before — and all the stories we heard about New York and Italy back in March and April, we’re living that now,” said Dr. Neeja Bakshi on Sunday.
Bakshi is an internal medicine physician who is working the COVID-19 ward at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton.
She shared a series of tweets this weekend in hopes of highlighting the importance of stopping the spread of the deadly virus.
Her tweets show a shocking snapshot of what health-care providers in the province are currently facing as COVID-19 hospitalizations mount. There are currently 601 people in hospital, 100 of whom are in intensive care.
Alberta saw 1,836 new positives confirmed on Sunday. A total of 615 people in the province have now died from COVID-19 since the pandemic began.
Bakshi, who spoke to Global News via video chat from the hospital Sunday, said that working with COVID-19 patients has been unpredictable and extremely sad.
“COVID is the great unknown,” she said. “Patients who have COVID are coming in, and they might be stable when they come in — and then they get sick, super, super sick the next minute, and we have really no way of predicting who’s getting sick and who’s not.
“People who we thought were stable all week long — all of a sudden crashing.”
“(The hospital) is full of sadness, full of critically-ill patients who don’t get to say goodbye to their families,” Bakshi said. “It is full of healthcare workers who are weary and tired and doing their best to continue to deliver quality care.”
She said she hasn’t been able to get to know patients as they come in — and some have died just 12 hours after being admitted.
“I haven’t been able to develop a relationship with the family, with the patient themselves, and now I’m calling the family to let them know, ‘I think your loved one has hours to live,'” Bakshi said.
Timothy Caufield, the Canada research chair in health law and policy at the University of Alberta who has researched the impacts of misinformation, said Sunday it is important for those on the frontlines to share their experiences widely.
“We do need these voices out there. We need to be flooding social media with good science,” Caufield said.
“The information that’s coming from physicians, from scientists, from public health authorities — that helps to counter that trend (of misinformation). And so it may not seem like it’s helping, but at the very least, it’s making things better.”
For Bakshi, she said she shared her thoughts to show how many health-care workers are having to live as hospitalizations rise.
“If we really try to process everything that we’re going through, I think we would break,” she said.
“I don’t have time to fear monger.
“I have time to share what I’m experiencing, because A, it is therapeutic for myself to be able to share with everybody what we’re experiencing; but B, to showcase the reality of what is happening in our own system in Edmonton, in Alberta,” she said.
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