Doctor “Zamora”, from a private hospital in Managua, recalls that the number of hospitalized patients became so large that he had to suspend the online and face-to-face consultations he gave before the outbreak, to dedicate all his time to caring for patients. their inpatients.
“Taking care of hospital patients was very tiring. It involved doing a whole ceremony to enter the “covid area”, wearing protective equipment, removing it every time one entered or left. In addition, it is more exhausting because they are delicate patients who are being monitored, you have to attend to all their needs and those of their families, make video calls to give reports, etc. ”, he recalls.
He also explains that despite having been practicing as a doctor for many years, dealing with the pandemic is a completely new experience for them and also for the patients, who face the disease without the physical support of their relatives and are at risk of not surviving.
“It is the hardest part. Break off. Knowing that they can die in a room, alone, without any relatives. Many of the patients suffered emotional breakdowns for this reason. For this reason, mental health is very important to us and in that sense technology helped us because we were able to develop a way of communicating between the patient and their family member”, he describes.
However, the experience of this doctor is not the same for everyone. In public hospitals, patients have no contact with their relatives who are waiting for news.
Doctor “Torres”, from the public hospital, describes that at the worst moment of the second wave, in his workplace, they had to reinforce the covid rooms with personnel from other areas and a doctor, with his nursing team, was at charge of up to 25 beds with seriously ill patients.
“When there was no regrowth and one was on shift, one could lie down for a couple of hours depending on how heavy the shift was, but with this outbreak we couldn’t do that because there were patients who were fine in the afternoon and at night they got complicated. and one had to find a way to raise his saturation, look for oxygen and if he did not get it, send him to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) to intubate. But the problem was when there was no space in the ICU, so the patient had to die because we couldn’t intubate him. That was the saddest thing, knowing that your patient is dying and you have already exhausted everything you had and that due to lack of resources you could not save his life”, he describes.
Dr. “Torres” calculates that the hospital where he works treated some 1,500 patients, including those who came for a consultation with mild symptoms and were sent home, those who remained hospitalized for a few days, and those who died. In just two months, according to this health worker, there were about 280 deaths, which means that about five people died per day.
“All the doctors at the hospital were shocked to see how people were dying, one felt that no matter how hard we gave our best, it wasn’t enough,” laments the doctor.
While these deaths occurred nationwide, which were even higher at the German Nicaraguan Hospital, where up to 30 people died in one day during the highest peak, the Minsa reported only one death per week.
