ReportageThe city hospital is already equipped with 108 intensive care beds, against 67 in normal times. But the healthcare teams do not see how they could accommodate 160 beds as in the first wave, in spring 2020.
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There is interstellar silence in the hallway. Night of Saturday April 3, 1 a.m. Regular pulsations of the machines. A distant alarm goes off. Then stop. False alarm. Behind the windows of the double airlock rooms, the strange brigade of white shadows bustles around the inert bodies caught in their cocoon of tubes, cables and infusions. Up there, in Brabois, above the city of Nancy, the Cardiological Intensive Care Unit (Usic) – the medical intensive care unit – is reminiscent of a spaceship. Twenty-two passengers on their way to the unknown – all of them under 70, some under 30 – whose fates are in the hands of six doctors, fifty nurses and some twenty nursing assistants, who relay there day and night.
The Easter vigil here, at the university hospital center (CHU), looks like a vigil of arms. While the government has just announced a third confinement, everyone fears a massive influx of patients. We felt it earlier with the swallowed tears of Karine Lhaute, nurse, when the 37-year-old man – 47, father of three kids – left, wrapped in a white cover hidden under a modest sheet. A free bed. Quickly filled. We can feel it in spite of the laughter which, at the table of the surveillance post, tries to wake up at night.
The calm that precedes storms? Caregivers of the “Sheaves” know. A year ago, the region had a front row seat when the Covid-19 hit. In a few weeks, between its different resuscitation centers (medicine, cardiology, neurology and trauma spread over several sites), the Nancy University Hospital had then gone from 67 to 160 beds, mobilizing for the sheave in particular, as here around the service of Professor Bruno Levy, 44 beds, almost an entire floor of the building.
At the time they were taken by surprise. Not this time. “Because we anticipated”, explains this pole leader. To cope with the third wave, the CHU has already increased to 108 beds and it is full. Eight new ones are to be assigned to intensive care this week. “But I don’t see how we could get to the 160 of the first wave. It is not a question of material, but of qualified personnel ”, he repeats urbi et orbi.
Hero of a film without credits
It is hardly the color of their shoes that sets them apart. White uniform, regulation blue scarf on the hair, mask. Same size, same fierce energy, same alert eyes. Thoroughness of gestures, economy of words … Everyone here knows what to do. When the night shift replaced the day shift, the Crocs dethroned tennis – we run less at night. But you have to last – the whole question is there – over the day, over the week, over life.
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