The 42-year-old without a vaccine has been at the largest Appalachian Regional Healthcare facility in Hazard, Kentucky, for 19 days and is struggling to breathe.
“Don’t get hooked because this is not a joke. This is not fun or a game,” he told CNN. “I want to go home. But I can’t go home because I can’t breathe still. That’s not a game at all, when you’re here and you can’t breathe and you feel like you’re going to die.”
Couch, who had two strokes and is retired, said he had a real fight with the virus.
“It’s bad to the bone,” he said from his hospital bed to Covid’s intensive care unit.
Couch said people need to take steps to protect themselves, such as social distancing, staying home and washing their hands so they don’t have the virus, which has infected more than 600,000 people in Kentucky and is back. to increase.
Couch admits he did not pay attention to the virus before he became ill. He does not know how he became infected and stayed home for eight days before arriving at the hospital.
Now that he has been very ill for more than 20 days, he plans to take the vaccine and said he told his friends and family. Some of her relatives have gotten the first dose and are expecting a second, she said.
Although the virus was hard on him, Couch said he never needed a fan.
It runs out of fans and staff
But many patients delay going to the hospital so long that when they get to ARH they have no choice.
The hospital, however, does not have enough ventilators, said director of respiratory therapy Rikki Cornett.
“We’re lacking fans,” he said. “We’re running out of supplies. I lend supplies to sister hospitals almost every day.”
And the staff is also short.
The hospital system needs 170 nurses to open extra beds. Nurses work longer hours and patients are doubled just to keep up.
“A respiratory therapist should comfortably have four ventilator patients. Right now I have seven to eight patients per respiratory therapist,” Cornett said.
The work has never been harder for doctors and nurses. Cornett said he catches the nurses crying and has to shed tears when he goes home after a shift.
There are no beds available at any of the ARH’s 13 facilities, said Chief Medical Officer Maria Braman. And 35 patients remain in the emergency department until an ICU ward is opened.
It is so serious that the whole hospital system has only three beds other than open ICUs.
“It’s been very, very hard. I get emotional because it’s our community,” said Wanda Combs, who has been a nurse for about 30 years and manages the nursing staff at ICU Covid and the cardiovascular unit.
“ICU nurses work very hard. They work hard every day, but you can usually see a difference … With that, they work just as hard or harder, and it hurts when you don’t see a difference,” she said. , while his eyes set well.
Some families need to understand the fact that their loved one will die, Combs said. “It’s hard for them to realize,‘ Oh, you mean this is the end. Is this really the end? “”
More than 18 months after the pandemic, the virus has roared again in Kentucky. And patients are sicker and harder to treat, staff said.
And there is another important difference.
“We’re seeing much younger patients than before,” said Jason Higgs, a registered nurse in the Covid-19 unit. “I have patients who are from 20 years old today to 75 years old. It attacks everyone. It’s not limited to one age group.”
“It’s destroying us,” Nurse Carolyn Eddington said. “I mean, everyone’s taking it. Everyone’s getting sick.”
He paused to collect his emotions. “We’re just seeing a lot of them right now.”
CNN’s Miguel Marquez and Bonney Kapp reported from Hazard. CNN’s Steve Almasy wrote from Atlanta.