Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hi, everyone. This is Dawn Klem, and you are on my podcast, Milkweed and Monarchs.
[00:00:08] Since I've been retired, I've really been looking back on my career in health care. And you can't be in health care for 45 years without having events that actually impact you in your own personal life or make you think about things maybe on a deeper level.
[00:00:29] And I would say the two things that impacted me greatly while I was working was, number one, the AIDS epidemic, and then, number two, Covid. And it's kind of funny, because AIDS epidemic started at the beginning of my health care career, and Covid ended out my health care career. So it's just funny how that happened. Started off with a bang, and I ended off with a bang, I guess.
[00:01:01] But in 1983, when I was still in San Diego and I was working as a licensed practical nurse at Mercy Hospital, we had a young male patient come into the hospital.
[00:01:14] Basically, he was emaciated. He was so thin when he came in, and he was so sick. He was just so sick. And we quickly put him in a private room and made it an isolation room, which meant that you had to gown up, glove up, you had to have shoe protectors on your shoes, you had to have a surgical cap on your head. And we had to wear a face mask and goggles. When we went into his room, we had no real understanding of what he had, what his illness was. And because of that, we didn't know if he was contagious and if we would spread it to other patients when we left his room. So it was imperative for us to be very precautious with him.
[00:02:08] He kept his room dark, so the blinds were always closed on the windows. He had the curtain pulled around him. A lot of times he was so thin, and he was wasting away. He was spiking fevers. We were giving him multiple antibiotics, and nothing really seemed to be working.
[00:02:31] And we just didn't know how to treat him. We had the infectious disease doctors rounding on him daily, but nobody really had any answers whatsoever at all on what was happening with him. And ultimately, he did end up dying. And it was sad. It was sad on so many levels. One, because we didn't really know why he was dying. And number two, he died frightened and alone. I don't think I ever saw anyone come into the hospital to see him. And so that memory definitely lives with me. That's not the kind of health care you want to be able to provide to a patient.
[00:03:20] It was really sad.
[00:03:24] After I left San Diego, of course, you know, I went to Massachusetts and became a registered nurse, and I moved to Cape Cod, and now I'm working as an rn. But before I started really working as an RN there, I decided to take a vacation. And I came home and I went straight to my grandparents farm in Ohio to see them. And while I was at their house, my grandma was getting People magazine at the time. And I will never forget that issue. There was an issue of People magazine, and the whole front cover was young men that had died from aids.
[00:04:07] And I remember looking at it thinking, oh, my God, that is just horrible.
[00:04:15] That is just horrible. And that's really what happened. It took such a long time for us to figure out what the AIDS epidemic was.
[00:04:27] Now, when you think about it, people are being treated with antivirals in a clinic. They're not even inpatient.
[00:04:35] So that magazine cover was impactful to me.
[00:04:42] I went back and I was working the 3 to 11 shift in Cape Cod Hospital, and a woman came in. She was a Hispanic. She was from Central America. She was young as well, and she had two little kids. I remember that. And she just struck a note with me. I remember feeling so sorry for her. Here she is in a foreign country, she's ill. No one knows what's wrong with her. Spiking fevers. We're doing the full work up on her.
[00:05:18] And one day I said to her, is there anything I can do to help you out? She said, I would, you know, in broken English, I would really appreciate it if someone could do my laundry for me.
[00:05:31] So, of course, if you all know me personally, you know that that wouldn't be a hardship for me. And I packed up all laundry in a pillowcase and I took it home and I did her laundry for her, and I brought it back to the hospital when I came back to work at the end of the week.
[00:05:51] And when I came back to work at the end of the week, the nurses could not wait to see me, because the very first thing they said to me is, don, the patient whose laundry you took home has aids. I go, what? They said, yes, she has aids. And she knew she had aids, but she didn't want to tell anybody. I said, I can imagine why she didn't want to tell anybody, because she's ashamed and she didn't want to be treated properly like a leper. I mean, I remember how we treated patients in San Diego. They were in full isolation, and it's a hard lot to bear.
[00:06:35] And. But in the back of my mind, I was thinking the whole time, am I Going to get AIDS from doing her laundry. Seriously, that is what I thought. I was nervous as hell about it because I wasn't wearing gloves when I threw her dirty clothes into the washing machine. Believe me.
[00:06:56] You know, it wasn't until years later that we started to really understand the AIDS epidemic and that it was a virus and we do have the proper treatment for it now. Most people who have AIDS are stable, but patients do occasionally die with aids, but it's usually secondary to something else that they may have. I had a patient who had non Hodgkin's lymphoma and also aids. And really the lymphoma is what he ended up dying from, not the aids, but it is some of the things that went on with it. And I don't know if any of you have seen the movie with Alan Alda and the band plays on, then you would understand that health care itself can be political.
[00:07:50] I think more of us understand that now that we have lived through the COVID epidemic. Covid was one of the worst things that I dealt with, partly because the patients that I were caring for at that time were already terminally ill.
[00:08:11] So then you put Covid on top of it. It's like, at least with the brain tumor patient, there were things that you could do and steps for them to keep moving forward. I had a lot of patients that lived five years with a terminal brain tumor, and I had one patient that lived 14 years with a terminal brain tumor. So you can live on with a brain tumor with monitoring and proper treatment. Ultimately, though, the brain tumor does recur and then you have a harder time coming out of it. Eventually it is turmoil and people will die.
[00:09:01] So now we have Covid on top of getting. Having a brain tumor, right?
[00:09:07] So I'm in the clinic when a Covid first came out, and it just wreaked havoc on our clinic. I mean, people, we were scared. We were scared because we didn't have answers. We didn't know what it meant. People were dying and we had no answers. We didn't know how it was contracted. We knew nothing, really, literally nothing.
[00:09:33] A lot of the physicians didn't even want to come into the office at all to see the patients. And that's when we really first started doing the stay at home thing and doing.
[00:09:46] The physicians would come to the office, but maybe the patients wouldn't and they could do a telehealth visit with them that way. Or sometimes the page. The physicians would not want to come in. I did. I was working for a fabulous neuro Oncologist and her. She had two little girls. One was four and the other one was maybe a year old, still a baby. And so she was really a nervous wreck about wanting to come into the office, and who could blame her for that? But we still had patients to take care of, so it was kind of a precarious situation. The PA that also worked with us had young school age children at the time. You can't help but think about your own families in those situations and the risk that you're putting yourself in by caring for patients. And, you know, our patients are compromised in their health to begin with, so they may be more separate, susceptible in contracting something like Covid.
[00:10:54] So she ultimately ended up quitting. And quite frankly, now that I'm retired and I look back, I think both of them had really legitimate reasons for wanting to leave that clinic at that time. It was a nightmare. I think the only thing that kept me going is I was older and I had already lived through so many things, and this was just going to be another thing that I was going to have to buck up and get through.
[00:11:26] So there were a couple of patients stories here, though, that I would like to share with you so that you can understand how it actually impacted outpatients.
[00:11:40] So one of my patients was an elderly man, he was in his late 70s, I think, and his wife and his son would come with him to his appointments. And they were a lovely family. Very, very lovely. I enjoyed them all very, very much.
[00:11:59] And he had gone through his initial treatment. He's had his surgery, his chemo and his radiation, and he's being followed now monthly, but monthly, he's still getting monthly chemo. So he's still at risk for contracting, you know, the flu, cold, anything like that. When we're cautious to make sure that people are taking good care of themselves and we're monitoring their blood counts.
[00:12:30] So one day he came in for his monthly appointment and he said to me, don, my very best friend died in the hospital of COVID and I really want to go to his funeral service.
[00:12:49] I was like, I mean, what are you gonna say to that?
[00:12:53] That was such a terrible predicament, I thought.
[00:12:58] So I was like, ray, I completely understand that you want to go to that funeral.
[00:13:08] And I'm not, definitely not going to say no to you, but it's not something that I want to say yes to either.
[00:13:17] How about if we talk about it a little more? Like, if you go to the funeral, could you be seated at the back of the church so that you're not in the midst of a crowd of people, Would that be a possibility? Well, he thought that might be something that he could abide by. And I said, the other thing is, at funerals, everyone hugs. Hugs each other, you know, because it's a time of sadness. So is there any way that you could just, you know, maybe wear gloves and just shake people's hands and not necessarily hug people?
[00:13:57] Well, he thought maybe he could do that too.
[00:14:01] So we. We managed to get through the conversation. And they left that day.
[00:14:09] Well, it wasn't long after that funeral, probably a couple of weeks, when he, Ray himself, came down with COVID and ended up having to go into the hospital.
[00:14:22] He went to that funeral, and now here he is, he has Covid.
[00:14:29] It was so disappointing for everyone.
[00:14:33] And in my heart of hearts, I knew it was because he had gone to that funeral.
[00:14:40] My heart sunk because there was no. A no win situation with that situation. And if I think about myself, I would have gone to the funeral too. I just know I would have.
[00:14:55] So it was hard.
[00:14:58] It was really, really hard.
[00:15:00] And he was in acute distress. I was following him while he was in the hospital, and he was really not doing well.
[00:15:11] And then ultimately he ended up dying, too.
[00:15:17] So that was heartbreaking.
[00:15:21] Although I. When I talked to his wife and son, I think everyone in their family was pretty much at peace.
[00:15:30] I think they felt that he was going to die from the brain tumor at some point anyway, and he had to honor his friend and it was worth the risk.
[00:15:49] And like I said, I think I probably would have done the same thing myself, But I had another patient.
[00:16:00] He was a truck driver, and he was newly retired, and he was a hoot. He was a wonderful human, too. He was so funny. And he had a wife and two daughters. His oldest daughter always came with him to the appointment, along with his wife.
[00:16:18] And it was just a wonderful family. Everybody was, you know, so happy that he had finally retired and so sad that now he had retired. He had a terminal illness. So you can imagine it was not an easy case.
[00:16:38] And in the beginning, he had been hospitalized because he had pneumonia. So they had been able to go in and see him when he had pneumonia and things were going okay. Well, he got out of the hospital, and then he contracted Covid.
[00:17:02] So he went back in the hospital, and he was actually on a Covid inpatient unit. We were trying to isolate our patients to a single unit so that it wasn't leaking out into the other units in the hospital. You can. Can you imagine what a nightmare that was, trying to Figure that out. I actually respected the leaders of our organization quite a bit during that time. I think they did the best they could to try to manage this thing. We didn't really understand what was going on with it. We didn't have a treatment yet. There were so many factors that were up in the air. And we were doing like telerounding every week via teams, which is a computer based rounding. And we were all on there listening to the leaders of our organization tell us about patient populations, how many patients we had with COVID and how many patients were dying. So the all the staff, inpatient and outpatient, were aware of where we stood.
[00:18:15] Well, our patient ended up getting Covid and it was during a time at the very beginning and we were not even letting people come and visit the patient. We couldn't let people come in. We just didn't have enough information. We didn't really understand.
[00:18:35] So his daughter could call him on the phone, but of course, you know, that's not like visualizing somebody. And then she would call me and she was crying so much and it was. It really was horrible, horrible that no one could go to be with him. And he kept getting worse. He kept getting worse. He was not getting better by any means. And to be stuck at home frustrated because you can't see him. And she kept saying things to me like, I just know he would improve if he could see, see me. And actually I think that is true, but there's not a darn thing we could do about it because there were so other, many other patients with COVID and we were just trying to muckle our way through a very, very muddy situation.
[00:19:33] Ultimately, the patient ended up dying and no one was with him when he died. His daughter called me so many times after his death because she was completely tortured that she could not be with her father when he died.
[00:19:52] This story is not the only one. There are so many families out there that lived through this kind of thing during COVID And it is heartbreaking to be able to share this with people, but I really wanted people to understand from the insider's point of view what was going on.
[00:20:17] I think the troubling thing for me once again is that it was a political thing, really. Politics and health care, Come on.
[00:20:29] It's just so, you know, I think of health care as a humanitarian thing, that we're trying to do good work to help people. And when it ends up in the political realm, it doesn't feel like that at all.
[00:20:50] I don't have a very high opinion of Dr. Fauci. And it's unfortunate when money gets involved and that money and politics and that clouds the situation.
[00:21:05] And when you see families like the families I saw going through AIDS and then going through Covid, you would understand that we could do better.
[00:21:24] Thank you for listening to my story today.
[00:21:28] I don't know why I felt compelled to tell the story, because I hope. I'm hoping that we're gonna change some of the ways that we go about things. I'm encouraged when I hear about some of the political changes that are going to go on, like with government waste, and I think that's one of the reasons why I'm telling the story, because health care gets wrapped up in that political scene, and then that ends up not in a good way.
[00:22:05] If you have a story you want to share, or even if you have a comment you want to make about this story, I would love to hear from you. And I would be happy to share comments on my podcast site about COVID or even aids. I think it would be good for the listeners to hear from other listeners personal stories that they have had to endure in their own lives.
[00:22:40] My website is milkmon.com M I L K M-O-N.com My personal phone number is 616-843-1392. If there's anything that you want me to talk about or if you'd like to share a comment with me that you think I would be able to share with our audience, please don't hesitate. It's impactful to hear from everyday people like me about situations that are happening in our country. The more open we are about things, I feel, the better off we're all going to be in the long run.
[00:23:27] Until the next time.
