Hunter Spencer had just wrapped up five consecutive shifts in an intensive care unit repurposed for COVID-19 patients when he began feeling more worn out than usual. In the first week of December, the 25-year-old cardiac surgery nurse in Tampa, Florida, determined he was one of many hospital workers who have dealt with getting the coronavirus since the pandemic began.
“I didn’t know I had it for a while. … I woke up. I was like, ‘Man, I’m really worn out this morning,’ and then I got to work,” Spencer, who works in the ICU at AdventHealth Tampa hospital, told the Washington Examiner. “The next day, I woke up in a sweat, and thankfully, I did not have to work the rest of the week.”
He sought to “power through” and continue with his daily routine around the house. Just six days later, on Saturday morning, Spencer said he woke up and “really didn’t feel well.”
“By that afternoon, I lost my taste and smell, and that’s when I was like, ‘Yeah, I have it for sure,’” Spencer said. “The loss of taste and smell was the definitive answer. Otherwise, I just felt like I had a head cold.”
By the time Spencer had contracted COVID-19, roughly 75% of healthcare workers at the hospital had gotten sick with COVID-19.
New hospitalizations in Florida had been on the rise for months prior to Spencer’s diagnosis. In the week ending on Dec. 6, an average of nearly 4,300 patients were admitted to hospitals in Florida each day. The steady incline continued until it hit its zenith on Jan. 14, when more than 7,700 new patients were hospitalized, according to the COVID Tracking Project.
The influx of new patients necessitated repurposing certain units of the hospital and training labs to hold COVID-19 patients exclusively. Spencer, usually a nurse in the cardiac ICU, was pushed on to a unit converted for coronavirus patients with fellow nurses who had not bargained on working in such catastrophic situations.
“They basically went from doing the nursing that they enjoy to being forced into being a COVID nurse,” Spencer said. One of his fellow nurses, Hannah McSwain, who spoke previously with the Washington Examiner about her experience as a COVID-19 nurse, has since started a new position in the hospital that is separate from the units outfitted to care for coronavirus patients. Spencer’s college roommate, meanwhile, who had worked at the same hospital, has since taken a new job in the emergency department at a different hospital.
Spencer said that while his hospital never felt the strain of having to care for too many patients than the hospital’s capacity would allow, staffing shortages were frequent because of burnout and illness. A single nurse was often tasked with caring for three COVID-19 patients in a shift. Panic about staff shortages gripped those nurses, including Spencer, who were trained to operate specialty equipment.
One such piece of specialty equipment is the ECMO machine, which takes over the job of the heart and lungs when they fail due to cardiac failure and respiratory distress. The life-support machine pulls blood out of the body and filters it through an artificial lung, which then infiltrates the blood with oxygen while removing carbon dioxide, before returning the oxygenated blood to the body. The machines are designed for patients to stay on for days or weeks.
“The only nurses that can run ECMO are nurses on my unit, and there were seven of us. And now, we’re down to five. … They just completely burned us out,” Spencer said. “We had one [patient] over the summer that was on ECMO for six weeks.”
New hospital admissions in Florida, the state that bore the brunt of the surge in hospitalizations last summer, have been on the decline since mid-January. In the week ending on Jan. 31, an average of slightly more than 6,500 patients had been admitted to Florida hospitals.
