In a ward packed with medical staff, Ollie Hou was among those trying to stop a COVID-19 patient who suddenly woke up to shout and fight in pain from moving around and pulling out the tube.
“Everyone ran inside the room, trying to restrain the patient,” he said. But since the hospital was running short on staff, “I need to use my hands to do so with a nurse, ” he added.
In order to inject anesthesia, there came the most incredible scene Ollie had ever seen. The nurse, with no spare hands, opened the package of syringes with his mouth.
“I was surprised because it’s super crazy and chaotic,” he said. But later on, he soon realized what happened on that day was merely one of the toughest moments that a Respiratory Therapy (RT) student had to get used to.
“The other day I went to check on a COVID patient. He was very depressed, saying he was going down like hell,” Ollie said, “at that moment, I didn't know what to say, so I just held his hand and prayed for him.”
With a pause, he added, “Sometimes I feel bad,” eyes downcast when spitting out the next few words in a relatively low voice, “because we don’t have the ability to save every patient.”
Ollie, only in his 20s, has already witnessed the terrible impacts caused by the global pandemic first-hand in the US, one of the hardest-hit nations around the world.
Currently, the 24-year-old has to do the 8-hour shifts for his clinical program, which wasn’t canceled due to the pandemic unlike most nurse students, at a hospital in Georgia State.
His job is mainly shadowing respiratory therapists to check patients with pulmonary issues and to treat them with oxygen therapy or devices that can help expand their lungs. And this is why, as COVID-19 pneumonia continues, the role these practitioners play in the world now can’t be more important.
“The lungs are the first body organ affected by COVID-19,” reported by the American Lung Association, “in the early days of an infection, the novel coronavirus rapidly invades cells in our respiratory system.”
Those who have contracted Coronavirus might develop symptoms like difficulty breathing or shortness of breath that can eventually lead to respiratory failure, also known as acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS).
To fight against the global pandemic, respiratory therapists have no choice but to expose themselves to the highly contagious virus.
“I can tell you how close I am to a COVID patient,” said Ollie, “when the patient breathes out, my head is close to his neck.” Because there would be a tracheostomy tube inserted through a cut in the patient’s neck and therapists need to conduct tracheostomy care, which means cleaning the tube, routinely.
However, despite the high rate of infection, he noticed that people in the hospital were not acting carefully as they should, partly due to a lack of PPE and the fact that “they didn’t experience SARS in 2003”.
Apart from not taking off gowns after checking on COVID-19 patients, Ollie pointed out one of his observations about the negative pressure room(NPR), “In Taiwan, we divide the NPR (negative pressure room) into two rooms so that medical staff can dress up in the first room and the patient is in the second room.
“But now in America, there’s just one door that separates the NPR and the outside,” he added, “I think it’s because the hospital doesn’t have enough rooms for the overflow of COVID patients.”
Before getting vaccinated, when Ollie was asked whether he’s concerned about his safety, he thought for a while and said, “I don’t worry about if I would get the virus. I worry about affecting my host family. That’s the stressful part.”
While those living with Ollie are actually fine with his work and giving him great support, there are still some people and friends that have become alarmed and started to keep a distance from him, which frustrated him more than the virus. “How people think about and look at practitioners and healthcare workers is the toughest part,” he said.
Nonetheless, the heavy workload is perhaps making him too busy to care about other people’s perspectives. “I will have to be at school on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 8.00 am to 4.30 pm, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I need to go to clinical at 6.30 am so I woke up at 5 these days,” he said.
Given the tight schedules, he admitted that one of the biggest challenges studying RT in the US is the feeling of tiredness and exhaustion. And students had to keep up with their schoolwork even when the vaccination caused some side effects such as nausea, muscle soreness, and fevers.
However, amid such an unprecedented academic year, Ollie emphasized that no one in his class gave up or voluntarily dropped out of the course because of the pandemic. More surprisingly, compared with the past, “we actually have the highest number of students who chose this course this year,” he said.
It seems that the young generation is inspired to contribute to saving a falling-apart world rather than intimidated by the disastrous reality.
“When I was in college, our teachers always told us: ‘nowadays we don’t have any acute or critical respiratory disease anymore; the ventilator companies, they aren’t gonna make it. We need to focus more on long-term care…’ but Boom! 2020!” Ollie said.
Back in Taiwan, he was already an RT student at Taipei Medical University, who planned to go to the US after his graduation and worked extremely hard on it. Therefore, in mid-2020 when America was no doubt still stuck in a complete COVID-19 catastrophe, he set off anyway.
In other words, foreseeing what’s ahead of him — a real battle against Coronavirus — Ollie jumped on a flight to the frontline.
How could he stand firm in a foreign country when so much is going on, accompanied by the recent surge in hate crimes against Asian heritage populations?
“I don’t consider myself a foreign student here in the US,” he said.
Then, with a steady voice, Ollie continued, “As an RT student, this is the thing I would have to face. I’m not afraid of the virus, not because I’m careless but it is my profession.”
*For the Chinese version please check: 【專訪】美國醫療前線的台灣人：「疫情中仍未放棄，因為呼吸治療是我的專業」
執行編輯：吳玲臻
核稿編輯：林欣蘋
