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The Pandemic's Hidden Victims: Sick or Dying, but Not From the Virus (NYT)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/20/health/treatment-delays-coronavirus.htmlThe Pandemic’s Hidden Victims: Sick or Dying, but Not From the Virus
As the coronavirus overwhelms the health care system, people with other illnesses struggle to find treatment.
By Denise Grady
April 20, 2020
Maria Kefalas considers her husband, Patrick Carr, a forgotten victim of the coronavirus.
In January, Mr. Carr, a sociology professor at Rutgers University, suffered a relapse of the blood cancer that he has had for eight years. Once again, he required chemotherapy to try to bring the disease, multiple myeloma, under control.
But this time, as the coronavirus began raging through Philadelphia, blood supplies were rationed and he couldn’t get enough of the transfusions needed to alleviate his anemia and allow chemo to begin. Clinic visits were canceled even as his condition worsened.
On April 7, Mr. Carr began receiving home hospice care. He died on April 16. He was 53. The pandemic “expedited his death,” Ms. Kefalas said.
“I’m not saying he would have beaten the cancer,” said Ms. Kefalas, a professor of sociology at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. “I’m saying it wouldn’t have been four months, this precipitous decline, fighting for blood, fighting for hospice nurses.”
“People like my husband now are dying not because of Covid, but because the health care system just cracked open and swallowed them up,” she said.
Beds, blood, doctors, nurses and ventilators are in short supply; operating rooms are being turned into intensive care units; and surgeons have been redeployed to treat people who cannot breathe. Even if there is room for other patients, medical centers hesitate to bring them in unless it is absolutely necessary, for fear of infecting them — or of health workers being infected by them. Patients themselves are afraid to set foot in the hospital even if they are really sick.
12 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
I am afraid to go anywhere near a hospital or a clinic to the point of lying abt. my declining condition. I do not fear death however. In fact, I look forward to the end of the suffering so is would be for the best.
However, my husband is supposed to have eye surgery next week.
Is that still on?
He doesn't know.
He will go blind without it however as he has partial sight in one eye after 12 years of surgery every 3 mos.
We are both high risk, old and afraid.
What a way to check-out so to speak!
Just what dump wants.
Sick sob.
Virtual hug.
