• TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Yeap, it’d be interesting to see how many medical providers had to retire early, burned out, or were taken out of commission from COVID. People don’t understand how damage loosing an experienced provider can have to a clinic.

    I work in orthopedics and rehabilitation and our clinic ended up loosing our oldest PA-C. He could have retired ages ago, but he loved teaching and he wasn’t going to leave his hospital during a pandemic.

    40 years of clinical experience, 40 years of educating young physicians at the same clinic, all snuffed out because some asshole couldn’t be bothered to wear a mask.

    I have conflicted feelings about COVID now a days, I’m glad that so many people were insulated from it. But I’m also outraged that these people insulated from harm now claim it wasn’t real, or a big deal.

    Any public figure who that attempted to minimize COVID should have been forced to help triage at their local hospital. They should have been forced to witness what a floors filled with vented patients looked like, sounded like, and felt like. People have no idea how close certain states were to a collapse of the healthcare system. Hell, my hospital was paying untrained office staff to provide medical care in the ICU under the guidance of a PA or higher.

    • medgremlin@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      I was lucky in that I worked in a specialty clinic, then a Peds ER during the pandemic and that I only caught it after getting the vaccination. I still got pyelonephritis as a bonus though. The roughest thing about the specialty clinic was that it was in oncology, so all of our patients were high risk and we still had asshats who whined about having to wear a mask in the clinic. During the worst of it, I was helping our plastic surgeon do in-office excisions of malignant melanomas as a temporizing procedure until the ORs opened up for the lymph node biopsies and radical excisions where needed.

      • TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Sounds pretty familiar, i am in a specialty clinic as well. Unfortunately we’re the state’s only trauma 1 hospital, and we had staffing issues before the pandemic. So when things started to get out of hand, pretty much any provider with a license had to do rotations in the ICU.

        I have a couple friends who were providers at our cancer institute at the time, I know they lost a lot of patients when we briefly shut down non emergent facilities as well.