Medics and nurses at a Tallahassee hospital have shared their heartbreaking experience when they have to remove conscious Covid patients off oxygen, knowing that they will die.
At the Tallahassee Memorial Hospital, medical staff refers to Covid patients that are conscious but unable to breathe by themselves as the “talking dead.”
“Those are patients who are still awake right now, who are still conscious, so they are having these very difficult conversations with their doctors and their nurses, and facing that very tough reality that if that life-sustaining equipment that’s breathing for them is removed, as this hospital official described it for me, they could be dead in a matter of minutes,” reporter Polo Sandoval said.
Top Clinical Officer at the hospital Ryan Smith emotionally shared the difficulty and sorrow of the moment a nurse has to remove a doomed patient off oxygen.
“The first part of my shift, I had my first few patients look at me and say, ‘Don’t let me die,’” he said.
“As soon as you remove them from the devices they no longer made it. To watch how quickly they dwindle down is the hardest thing to me.”
“The ‘talking dead’ didn’t make sense to me until I saw it firsthand. It’s how quickly they decompensate when they don’t have that oxygen.”
He concluded: “The rest of the world can’t see what goes on behind these doors. We want Covid to go away, but the reality is that it is here. It’s real. It impacts a lot more people than it should.”
