A look inside a modern COVID-19 “field hospital”

CRANSTON, RI (AP) – Nicholas DiPompo finally leaves home.

Squeezing his cane, the 78-year-old former property manager, who had spent weeks fighting COVID-19 at a Rhode Island field hospital, sat in a wheelchair and shouted through the wheel. hol.

“You took my number,” DiPompo shouted to his sick colleague Art Singleton, whom they had approached after three weeks together. “Give me a call when you go out.” He said they would go to his favorite restaurant for baked stuffed lobster.

Singleton, 56, was in a wheelchair watching a nurse push her boyfriend into the makeshift hallway. Another nurse pulled DiPompo’s oxygen tank behind him, next to a long row of blue curtains, a bed behind each.

“I was at the bottom,” DiPompo said of his friendship with Singleton, a pizzeria employee who had lost part of his leg due to diabetes. “He had no legs, I had heart disease.”

Then DiPompo left, leaving the field hospital built in an old Citizens Bank call center, in a two-story office building, on a busy shopping street. The New England Care Non-Profit Health Network opened Kent Field Hospital on November 30, just before the Rhode Island infection rate became the highest in the world. Kent Hospital used all its beds for the sickest patients with COVID-19 and needed it somewhere for an outbreak. Now, other hospitals occasionally send patients to the field hospital.

The infection rate in Rhode Island has dropped since then and many of the 335 field hospital beds are now empty. On quiet days, the medical staff wants to be able to do more.

Only stable, non-intubated patients with COVID-19 are transferred a few kilometers to the field hospital and only if they agree. Some refuse. The idea of ​​a field hospital can evoke images of huge tents in a war zone, the sides of the canvas blowing in the wind.

It’s not like that. A $ 6 million renovation turned the office building into a modern hospital for less sick COVID patients, with negative pressure air ducts meandering along the ceilings, removing airborne infections.

About 200 patients went through the field hospital, most spending only a few days before leaving home to complete recovery. Unlike a regular hospital, where COVID patients cannot leave their rooms, patients here are free to travel.

With a small number of patients, the medical staff pays special attention to each person: helping them walk the corridors to improve lung capacity, stretching stiff legs, sharing ice, coloring pictures with an elderly man, cutting Singleton’s hair.

Relatives give up fresh clothes and food, even bringing enough pizza once for all staff and patients. Table bells, such as the ubiquitous ones on hotel desks, sit next to each bed to call nurses.

Then there’s what the staff call the “honeymoon suite,” the curtain booth where Peter and Pauline Sorrow end – hopefully – their coronavirus battles.

Peter, 62, and Pauline, 71, have been together for 25 years. The longest time they were separated was the five days Peter was first hospitalized in January for COVID-19. Since then, through recovery and recurrence, he has been to the main hospital twice and is now finishing his second stage in the field hospital. A few days after Pauline became ill for the first time, they were right across the hall from the main hospital, isolated in their own negative pressure rooms, communicating by phone.

Pauline, who is still mostly bedridden, was thrilled when her bed was turned next to Peter’s in the field hospital.

Now she helps take care of it: opening a stubborn lid at lunch, cleaning a place to eat from her dress, updating her family.

“He saved me,” she said. While they both recover constantly, Pauline worries that COVID-19 could take them both.

“Sometimes I wonder if we’ll wake up and not be here,” she said.

In many ways, the quieter pace of the field unit is a welcome relief for medical staff. Temporary nurse Geer, 33, saw the disease devastate New York City last year.

This is different: “It was a breath of fresh air to see how many patients we could discharge,” she said.

Dr. Paari Gopalakrishnan, who runs the field hospital, thought they would be ready to close it. But with the main hospital still crowded with patients – many with severe COVID-19 – it is too early for this decision.

“What we essentially did was hit the box on the road,” he said. The field hospital is “easy to stop, but very difficult to restart.”