Doctors and nurses talk about the patients who changed their lives. This week: Anesthesiologist David Pattyn.
“Only their eyes I remember, big eyes that reflected how scared they were of what was to come. I watched them gasp, surrounded by complete strangers in lunar suits speaking words they couldn’t understand from behind protective plexiglass. All alone, without their loved ones, whom they might have wanted to confide in before disappearing into a no man’s land from which no one knew if they would ever get out.
“When the corona epidemic swelled, we agreed in our hospital that the anesthesiologists would assist with the technical work. If patients were so bad that they needed to be ventilated, we would put them to sleep, intubate them, and place the catheters to administer drugs. That is our day-to-day work in the operating room, we are good at it, and it allowed the ICU doctors to focus on caring for the patients, in a department that quickly became overcrowded.
“We are used to reassuring patients, we explain what will happen before an operation, but in the months that corona seemed to have taken over our hospital, the human dimension disappeared. So many patients, all with the same disease, whom we tried to reach from behind our plexiglass helmet that silenced our words, the ICU full of sleeping people, often ventilated in a prone position, so that they no longer even had a face and all alone, because family due to the risk of infection was not allowed to come.
“The covid patient was an anonymous patient, there is no one who has stayed with me, I have only remembered some details. And yet it is precisely this anonymity that has made a great impression on me.
“The patients we had to ventilate had recently been told about the risks involved, that it was not certain that they would survive. In their eyes we saw a kind of fatalism, a realization of this it was, a look that touched us all. They must have been extremely anxious right before we put them to sleep. The first time I had to intubate a covid patient, I didn’t really realize it, I was especially shocked because the man fell so hard before our eyes, he turned ashen in half a minute.
“I didn’t really see what was happening until I took my camera to the hospital. In my spare time I am a nature photographer, during the corona crisis I first felt the need to record what was happening in our department. When I stood on the sideline and looked through the lens, I suddenly noticed how difficult communication was. What my colleagues were saying was hard to understand even for me, but their words didn’t reach the patient either. He was only concerned with one thing, getting enough oxygen. There was no time to ask how he felt, no chance to connect.
“Good communication with the patient and the family: when that suddenly no longer works, you see how essential that is. We did what we could to provide good care, but we were unknown and unrecognizable to the patients, the patients were anonymous to us. We couldn’t offer more than technical actions and that gave me a great feeling of powerlessness and alienation.
“When I later went to photograph in the IC, I saw how an unreal atmosphere had arisen there too. Never before has it been so hectic and yet the silence reigned. In the background, only the beeps of the IVs and the soft hum of the ventilators could be heard. In my photos the patients are not visible, you could call it symbolic of what was going on.
“I want to bundle the photos for my colleagues. In a few years we may have forgotten how intensive this period has been. Then the images show how hard we worked, how concentrated we were and how great the togetherness was. Our mutual bond has improved, we now know that we can count on each other when it comes down to it. But what the patients have had to go through is terrible: all alone in the hospital and not knowing whether you will come out dead or alive. And there was nothing we could do to take away their fear and loneliness. We could only tell them that we would take good care of them.”
