During this pandemic, everyone has been showing extreme thanks to all essential workers who are under extreme stress right now, especially all of those working on the frontlines in hospitals. One of those workers is Lynn Barta, an OB-GYN hospitalist at Rose Medical Center in Downtown Denver.
Lynn Barta’s experience in working with the coronavirus has been very confusing and quite scary, as things change all the time, and working with pregnant women has been a very unique experience as well.
“It’s been a little bit scary because nobody really knows what’s the right thing to do both for patients, as well as for health care providers. In the OB world, we generally have healthier patients than the kind of patients that come in sick with coronavirus and then go to the ICU and all that, but pregnant patients can get that sick as well so we’ve been trying really hard to make sure that we’re doing all the right things to keep the pregnant women healthy. Because we’ve asked patients not to come in unless they really need to to check with their health care providers first, we’ve had fewer patients coming in to be evaluated so when patients come in they’re really, generally, they have something going on and they need to stay or they’re in labor and are having a baby so they need to stay, so we have to act pretty fast once they get to the hospital.”
Like many other hospitals and medical centers across the world, shortage of PPE, or personal protection equipment, has proved to be a main struggle while healthcare providers continue to treat patients.
“The recommendations for working with coronavirus patients have been to use more equipment to protect ourselves than usual, and hospitals really haven’t had the supplies so it’s been a challenge.”
Another main challenge involving the PPE is the shortage of testing, which means that when someone comes in who is suspicious of having the coronavirus, all of the doctors still have to put on the recommended PPE.
“We had patients, initially, who came in who we were suspicious had coronavirus but we didn’t have a test result back, which was pretty much everybody. They were called ‘person under investigation’ and that means we had to treat them like they were positive, so that means we had to wear all of the personal protective equipment. It’s a lot more than we usually wear even to go into the patient’s room. We had to have this PPE on just to go in and talk to her or check on her. A face shield, a mask and a special kind of mask that are better for viruses like this, a gown over our scrubs and gloves.”
Although using all of this PPE is required, it doesn’t have a very positive effect on patients who are there because they’re sick or going to have a baby.
“Women who come in, in labor, are scared or anxious or nervous to have all these people coming around them, to have all these masks and face shields and gloves and gowns on. It’s really scary and people are scared in labor anyway so it’s been quite a bit of effort for us to make sure that patients are comfortable with what’s going on. To explain why we’re wearing them, to explain what we’re doing, to still try to be able to calm them down and and make them comfortable with their care.”
Even though it seems hard to find the good in everything happening right now, Lynn Barta says that things are changing and we will get through this.
“We were getting the test results back faster so we have a little bit of an easier way to tell the difference between somebody who’s a person under investigation and somebody who’s really positive. And that’s made it a lot easier because then we just have to put all the personal protective equipment on when they’re positive ones we know they’re positive…it’s important to follow the guidelines and it’s important to stay up with all the changes everyday and it’s not going to last forever, eventually we will have a vaccine and this will be better…it’s been hard, it’s been hard and stressful. But it’s getting better, the testing is much more available now, the PPE, we’re getting caught up with PPE, so it is getting better.”
Lynn Barta and millions of other frontline workers will continue to fight against the coronavirus and providing care to thousands of Americans who desperately need it.
