As hospitals across the country fill with patients displaying symptoms of the coronavirus, people with health issues unrelated to the virus are growing increasingly worried they will not have access to the medical care they need.
“Like millions of older adults I was anxious that a brush with COVID-19 could be deadly,” Mike Miles, a retired mechanical engineer living in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, wrote in Politico magazine this week. “I didn’t realize the risk the virus posed to me even if I never came in contact with it.”
Miles has high-grade bladder cancer, a diagnosis he received in August. He said he had two surgeries followed by a round of immunotherapy treatment and requires regular testing.
His post-surgery treatment was going smoothly, he said, but the arrival of COVID-19 changed everything.
“I went in for a routine cancer biopsy at Duke University Hospital. Even before we had the results, my doctor told me he wasn’t sure they would be able to administer another round of immunotherapy treatment,” Miles said. “My doctor told me that, while the vaccine was still available, there weren’t enough masks and gloves to administer it to cancer patients like me. All I could do was hope the biopsy results came back negative so I wouldn’t need the treatment at all.”
Stories like Miles’s have been popping up across the country as hospitals struggle to deal with an influx of coronavirus patients.
One patient insisted to Dr. Comilla Sassion that she “would rather die than risk getting coronavirus right now,” the doctor told NBC News.
The patient, Sasson said, was showing signs of a heart attack, and the doctor recommended that she go to a local hospital during a telehealth call.
“I asked if I could talk to one of her family members, and she said ‘no’ — that she had already made up her mind,” Sasson said.
People living with disabilities have expressed similar fears.
“I would be in an awake coma for weeks [if I contracted the virus],” Daniel Florio, a 50-year-old lawyer from Maplewood, New Jersey, who was born with spinal muscular atrophy, told the Atlantic. “The fear of that … it’s overwhelming.”
The rush to treat COVID-19 patients has forced healthcare providers, often low on supplies and lifesaving equipment, to make difficult staffing and medical decisions on a daily basis.
The Ohio Department of Health halted all nonessential surgeries on March 17 in order to preserve personal protective equipment in hospitals.
The Cincinnati Enquirer reported the resulting cancellations of surgeries will cost local hospitals $1.2 billion per month and will force healthcare providers to lay off hundreds of workers.
Health officials in New York City, a hotspot for the virus, have instructed first responders not to bring patients to hospitals if they have no heartbeat.
President Trump commissioned the USNS Mercy to New York last week in an attempt to ease hospital overcrowding in the city. The ship is currently housing non-COVID-19 patients.
Miles, who is still not sure when he’ll be able to get another test for his cancer, said the federal government is failing COVID-19 patients and everyone with serious health concerns.
“I’m not a political person. I don’t belong to either party,” Mile wrote. “For the most part, I don’t care who is running the country, but I expect that in times of crisis that government uses its resources to take care of its citizens. And right now I don’t see that happening.”
