Covid intensive care unit: too many die

• fromClaudia Kabel

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The deputy head of the hospital’s Covid intensive care unit reports on his work. “We know that almost 30 percent of Covid intensive care patients also die internally,” he says.

Gunnar Gölzenleuchter, deputy head of a Covid intensive care unit and intensive care nurse:

“I am the deputy head of a Covid intensive care unit. Right now I just feel tired and exhausted. For weeks I – and of course my colleagues too – have been doing several jobs in a row. Corona does not spare us, either, who have learned to protect themselves in the professional environment: Some colleagues have corona themselves and are absent. As a team leader, like all my colleagues, I work directly on the patient – I actually have administrative tasks to do as always, but I only get to that after the end of duty.

We work in an intensive care unit and are therefore used to patients dying too. But what we are currently experiencing is different. The patients we see here all have the same clinical picture. They are between the ages of 40 and 80, and the disease progression in its phases is often very similar and so aggressive. Although we fight so hard for everyone who is sick, too many die.

It is very stressful for all of us that our patients come to our ward highly motivated but with extremely low oxygen levels in their blood and willingly take part in all the sometimes very strenuous therapy measures. For example, breathing with very high oxygen concentrations, so-called high-flow oxygen therapy, which is really exhausting and stressful for the patient. From the very beginning, however, we ourselves have the fear in the back of our minds that it could lead to a tragic course that we cannot always prevent, although we try with all our might.

Working with the seriously ill Covid patient: inside is so exhausting: We turn the ventilated patient: inside from the back to the stomach and back again, we constantly monitor all organ functions, we care for them all around – and all of this with protective clothing under the you sweat insanely. It is frustrating when you do everything under these difficult conditions to make a sick person well and then it happens anyway … We know that almost 30 percent of Covid intensive care patients die internally in our country too. That’s way too much for us in the intensive care unit, too.

It’s nice that the team works so well and sticks together. We support and comfort one another. The other day a colleague cried like this because someone died. In such

At times, the whole effort seems pointless and you feel so powerless. It is also bad when you have looked after someone who is better at first, and then you come to the next service and his condition has worsened again.

What motivates us again and again is that we receive so much support from outside. There are restaurants that bring us food or donate cake, and there is also a lot of support from private individuals. Relatives keep bringing us cakes or writing nice cards – that helps!

And there are real bright spots: Two Covid patients, who we treated here for intensive care in the spring, came by and thanked us. This made our entire team very happy and motivated. They both felt really bad. Now to see that they are fit again, that’s just great. “

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