A look inside a modern COVID-19 field hospital

CRANSTON, RI (AP) – Nicholas DiPompo was finally going home.

Grabbing his cane, the 78-year-old former property manager, who had spent weeks battling COVID-19 at a Rhode Island field hospital, got into a wheelchair and passed a grill in the hallway. .

“You have my number,” DiPompo called to his sick partner Art Singleton, whom he had met after three weeks together. “Call me when you leave.” He said they would go to his favorite baked lobster restaurant.

Singleton, 56, sat in a wheelchair and watched a nurse push her friend down the makeshift hallway. Another nurse pulled DiPompo’s oxygen tank behind her, passing a long row of blue curtains, a bed behind each.

“We were at the bottom,” DiPompo said of his friendship with Singleton, a pizzeria employee who had lost part of a leg due to diabetes. “I had no feet, I had heart disease.”

DiPompo then left, outside a field hospital built in a former Citizens Bank call center, in a two-story office building on a busy shopping street. The nonprofit Care New England health network opened Kent Field Hospital on November 30, just before Rhode Island’s infection rate was the highest in the world. Kent Hospital used all of its beds for the sickest COVID-19 patients and needed a place for the overflow. Now, other hospitals also occasionally send patients to the field hospital.

The Rhode Island infection rate has dropped since then and many of the 335 field hospital beds are now empty. On quiet days, the medical staff wants more things.

Only stable, non-intubated COVID-19 patients are transported a few miles to the field hospital and only if they consent. Some refuse. The idea of ​​a tent hospital can evoke images of giant tents in a war zone, with the sides of the fabric blowing in the wind.

This is nothing like it. A $ 6 million renovation turned the office building into a modern hospital for less sick COVID patients, with negative-pressure air ducts meandering along the ceilings, pulling out airborne contagions.

About 200 patients have passed through the field hospital, most spend a few days before going home to finish recovering. Unlike a normal hospital, where COVID patients cannot leave the rooms, patients here can roam freely.

With a low number of patients, the medical staff pays a lot of attention to each person: helping them walk down the aisles to improve lung capacity, stretching stiff feet, handing out frostbite, painting pictures with an old man, cutting their hair and Singleton.

Relatives leave fresh clothes and food, they even bring enough pizza once for all staff and patients. Table bells, just as they were always ubiquitous on hotel desks, sit next to each bed to ask for nurses.

Then there’s what the staff call “the honeymoon suite,” the cubicle with curtains where Peter and Pauline Sorrow are finally lucky, ending their battles with the coronavirus.

Peter, 62, and Pauline, 71, have been together for 25 years. The longest they have been separated were the five days Peter was first hospitalized in January by COVID-19. Since then, due to recovery and relapse, he has been to the main hospital twice and is now finishing his second stage in the field hospital. For a few days after Pauline first fell ill, they were on the other side of the main hospital hallway, isolated in their own negative pressure rooms, communicating by phone.

Pauline, who is still mostly bedridden, was thrilled when they rolled her bed next to Peter in the field hospital.

Now he helps take care of her: by opening a stubborn lid on her lunch, cleaning up some food from the dress, and updating her family.

“He saved me,” he said. Although both are constantly recovering, Pauline worries that COVID-19 can still take them both.

“Sometimes I wonder if we’ll wake up and not be here,” he said.

In many ways, the slower pace of the field unit is a relief for the medical staff. Subrina Geer, 33, a nurse with a temporary assignment, watched as the disease ravaged New York City last year.

That’s different: “It was a breath of fresh air to see how many patients we could discharge,” he said.

Dr. Paari Gopalakrishnan, who runs the field hospital, thought they would be ready to close it. But with the main hospital still full of patients (many with severe COVID-19), it is too early for that decision.

“What we basically did is throw the can down the road,” he said. The field hospital is “easy to close, but it’s very difficult to turn it back on.”