Goodbye 2021–A Year of Hospitals

I think I’ve been inside a hospital 30 times last year, and I didn’t even have COVID-19. Actually, I did get COVID, but I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t gotten tested. Which is a good reason to get tested and mask up because so many people are walking around with an asymptomatic virus that will infect other people and cause all kinds of havoc.

This is not going to be another blog about COVID, but rather about the astonishing fact that our health care system is still functional and helping people after two years of a world-altering virus. So I guess it is about COVID after all!

This is not a good year to be visiting a hospital if you don’t need to. Or going to the ED if there’s any other option.

2021 began for us with a move back to the US from Ethiopia. All our sons left the continent of Africa before us, and our youngest, Jacob, started his junior year of high school with a host family while we finished our term as Country Reps with Mennonite Central Committee in Ethiopia.

This was already a medically complicated prospect since Jacob had a spontaneously dislocating shoulder that had to be surgically repaired last summer. I don’t know if that’s a medical term, but it is a fairly accurate description of what would happen. Jacob would be minding his own business and doing something simple–say, sweeping dog hairs out of the carpet on his hands and knees with a hand broom, or reaching up and behind him to pick up his guitar–and pop, there goes his shoulder!

After moving back to the US, he had it fixed with a Bankart Repair at UVA Sports Medicine in Charlottesville.

Jacob also struggled with acne and his host family had to run him to dermatology appointments and take him to the lab for blood work while he took the super-strong anti-acne drugs. More time in doctor’s offices and hospitals during a pandemic.

It was quite a year for the poor guy–landing in the States after eight years in Africa, new school during COVID, horrible acne under his mask, his arm in a sling because of the shoulder surgery, and THAT’S NOT ALL!

The DAY after we landed in the US, Jacob’s body just fell apart. After about five glorious hours of snowboarding on Massanutten, Jacob got up in the middle of the night to pee and couldn’t walk. I mean, he really and truly couldn’t stand up. His host dad had to carry him to the bathroom. This is a boy who’s six foot six, and looks skinny but that’s just because he’s tall. He’s massive. And his leg was in excruciating pain, like someone had thrown the Cruciatus Curse at him.

We were supposed to be in quarantine after international travel (which is why Jacob was still with his host family), but instead we masked up and started taking Jacob to all the places where we shouldn’t be. The pediatrician. The physical therapist. The pediatric rheumatologist in Richmond. Diagnostics and imaging. UVA sports medicine. More diagnostics and, finally, the MRI machine.

After a month of the Harry Potter torture curse, crutches, online school (because he couldn’t walk) steroids, pain meds, and a diagnosis of some scary chronic rheumatic disease, the MRI finally revealed an acute infection in Jacob’s hip joint. They put him on strong antibiotics, and in two weeks he was riding his bike to school!

Our neighbor, who is a retired orthopedic surgeon, told Jacob that the first thing he learned at bone school was that if you hear hoof beats, don’t conclude it’s a zebra. It’s probably a horse. Maybe a donkey. But in most, really almost all cases, it’s not going to be a zebra. Well, Jacob’s infected sacroiliac joint was a zebra, all right. Not common, and not what anyone expected.

This Christmas break, the boys went with their cousins to a climbing gym in Blacksburg. We adults went to have coffee while the boys studied paths up an overhanging wall and crawled from grip to grip. They were working on lateral jumps when we got back to pick them up.

The MINUTE we walked in the door, Daniel fell to the ground and started writhing around. He was a dramatic one, and I thought he was putting on a show for us. Nice work Danny Boy, let’s go home. But no.

This was only the second knee he dislocated. The left knee had gone through about five spontaneous dislocations, kind of like Jacob’s shoulder, (what is going on with these boys?) and they finally put an end to it by grafting a ligament into his knee to hold it all in place.

So two weeks before Christmas, just as Omicron was spiraling up to unleash havoc on the hospitals, Daniel took his first ambulance ride to the Carillon ED in Christiansburg. He was in a great deal of pain but lucid and hysterically funny. He kept up a morbid chatter with the EMTs who said that he was the best patient they’d had all year. (As the stretcher went into the ambulance: “Have you ever dropped someone?” “Once, but they were fine.” “Ok, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, super cool, very cool.” Winces in agony.) We arrived during the evening nursing shift change, and the place was so full of COVID patients that he got most of his treatment in the corridor from a traveling nurse and a pharmacist. After several hours in the Hallway of Pain, they gave him some painkillers and relocated his kneecap. He left with a pair of crutches and a stiff knee brace and instructions to follow up at UVA sports medicine in Charlottesville. Yup, we’ve been there!

By the way, when we finally got an appointment with the sports medicine earlier this week, the doctor told us that it’s pretty easy to reset a kneecap. You pull the leg straight and the patella slips back into place! That bit of knowledge could have saved hours of pain and thousands of dollars…

If Daniel is Patient #2 in our household, Omar is Patient #3. Omar is a Spanish teacher at Eastern Mennonite University, here for a year under an international exchange program through Mennonite Central Committee. We are his host family. Like Daniel and Jacob, Omar is no stranger to pain, although his is not in his joints. He came here with this in his kidney:

It measured 23 mm, almost an inch in diameter, and seemed to us about as alarming as a meteor about crash into Earth. Which is what it looks like in the x-ray. It took multiple office visits, referrals, and two procedures under general anesthesia to blast the stone apart and send it on its way. That, and a broken wisdom tooth that had been partially extracted before Omar left his country of origin, are hopefully the only medical/surgical needs Omar will experience during his year in the US!

Still, we weren’t done with non-COVID medical emergencies in 2021. It was New Year’s Eve and I got a call from my mother saying that my step-dad was vomiting. He had been managing abdominal pain for three days but now that he was vomiting, what should she do? This sounded to my non-medical ear like it might be an intestinal blockage.

I suspected that because earlier in this year of non-COVID medical horror, a friend had similar symptoms–a blockage which turned out to be colon cancer! More opportunity to navigate the challenging COVID time hospital landscape.

With my friend’s history in mind, I recommended that I drive Mom and Dennis to the ED that evening. Never mind that it was New Year’s Eve.

We chose Augusta Medical Center and checked into the ED at 10 pm. They quickly scheduled a CAT scan with contrasting dye and found gallstones. They scheduled surgery to remove the gall bladder in the morning. Mom and I got home at 3 am, and Dennis went into surgery the next morning alone, but in competent hands.

It turns out his gall bladder was dead and gangrenous. It had been in there for a long time, slowly rotting away. Maybe Dennis had ignored symptoms, not wanting to risk COVID exposure by getting it checked out? Had he delayed any longer, it would have turned septic. As it was, it took 11 days for him to fight off the infection and stabilize before he could be released. Halfway through his stay, AMC stopped allowing any visitors because of the Omicron spike, so most of that time was spent alone with the medical staff for companionship.

When we drove down to pick him up–was that only three days ago??–I brought a few boxes of Gearharts gourmet chocolates, handmade in Virginia, to leave at the front desk with the security guys and at the nurses station as a token of our appreciation for the care he received.

Six people in my close circle needed emergency medical care and hospitalizations this year when COVID was relentlessly filling the hospitals and sapping the strength of doctors, nurses, and support staff. People I love have died from COVID. Many, many people I know and love (including my husband and myself) have gotten the virus and survived, some with severe illness and some with little or no symptoms. COVID is everywhere, and systems are straining.

Yesterday, my church held a prayer vigil at our local hospital, Sentara RMH. About 30 people gathered in the chilly afternoon to walk around the buildings, talking softly and stopping along the way to offer silent and spoken prayers. A beloved church member was a patient inside after suffering a seizure, possibly connected to treatments for a brain tumor. Other church members were RMH employees. Many of us, like my own family, had come to the hospital during the COVID years for imaging, lab work, and treatments for every ailment.

A hospital employee who worked on the COVID floors led our group across the hospital grounds. Things inside were chaotic. The Emergency Department was overwhelmed, with day-long waits for admission. Morale was low, with staff having to deal with sometimes angry and belligerent family members unable to accept that their loved ones were dying. The employee was cautious about speaking openly about the heartbreak and chaos inside the hospital walls, and was clearly affected by the burden she was carrying.

We prayed for the COVID patients. For the doctors, nurses, chaplains, and support staff who cared for them. We prayed for their family members, spouses, partners, children, friends, and colleagues. We prayed for their healing and for healing for those they left behind if they died. We prayed for the non-COVID patients. For those who avoided the care they needed because they wanted to avoid the virus. For those who sought care and could not find an appointment. Or a bed. For those sent back home, and those who died of treatable, preventable illness. We prayed for the fear, the confusion, the anger. We prayed for forgiveness. For endurance. For peace.

Please do everything you can to reduce this suffering. Support your health care professionals. Protect your children and your family. Look after your friends. Take care of yourself. Get vaccinated. Get boosted. We are all in this together. And sometime, each one of us will need a hospital. It shouldn’t be the COVID floor.