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Mitch: For University of Utah Health and The Scope Presents, this is Clinical.

I'm Mitch Sears, producer for The Scope Radio, and you're listening to Episode 8 of our series "Unit On The Brink." This is a multi-part story that is told in order. And if you haven't listened to our previous episodes yet, we highly recommend you go back and start with Episode 1 in your podcast app.

"Unit On the Brink" is a story that intimately explores the firsthand experience of medical frontline workers during the coronavirus pandemic. The stories that are shared are raw and occasionally deal with personal trauma. Listener discretion is advised.

For nurses and providers working in intensive care, death is something that comes with the vocation. After all, medical workers in ICUs across the nation are tasked with treating the sickest and most severely injured patients, yet the severity of the COVID-19 virus and the safety protocols enacted to contain its spread was testing the emotional limits of even the most battle-hardened veterans in the medical intensive care unit, people like charge nurse Alisha Barker who had served through the H1N1 pandemic of 2009.

Throughout the winter surge, COVID death rates for Utah were increasing. Despite new and refine treatment procedures and protocols showing real promise in improving survivability, the sheer number of new SARS-CoV-2 cases were filling up Utah hospitals with extremely ill patients.

Where Utah had seen a statewide average of 1 to 5 daily deaths between March and August, those rates more than doubled throughout the cold winter months, with a high of 36 Utahns passing from the virus January 26, 2021.

We now return to the morning of December 10, 2020. Shift change in the medical intensive care unit, the frontlines during the winter surge of cases in Utah, to share what it was like for frontline workers that found themselves bidding farewell to more patients than many had ever had to before and how they found the courage and resilience to carry on and maintain hope through the dark winter months.

Presented by Clinical and written and reported by Stephen Dark. This is episode 8, "Saying Goodbye."

Stephen: By 7:40 a.m. that December 10th morning at the University Hospital Medical ICU, the charge nurse had finished going through the roster of patients. Nurses had chosen their patients for the day shift, and all that was left was to send them on their way.

Nurses and healthcare assistants fanned out to talk to the night shift about the patients they were taking over for more detailed insight into how the night had gone. The transfer of care complete, the unit went eerily quiet for a while as nurses busied themselves attending to their patients.

Then, at 10:00 a.m., proning began. That's when sedated patients on ventilators are turned over. Proning helps patients with their breathing because it aids delivery of oxygen to parts of their lungs that aren't otherwise reached when they're on their backs.

But staff knew that as more patients needed to be proned, some more of them were edging closer to not coming back from the brink that COVID-19 had pushed them to.

Being put on a ventilator, after all, was in no way a guarantee that they would survive the virus, but rather a reflection on how much damage the virus had inflicted on their lungs.

As more COVID-19 cases filled up the MICU's roster, staff had to organize into groups to do seemingly endless numbers of exhausting pronings. For larger patients in each of the equipment-crowded rooms, that means three nurses each side, along with the primary nurse or attending provider reading the protocols, and the respiratory therapists, if available, managing the patient's airway.

The physical energy and mental concentration that goes into each half-hour proning, especially when you have to repeat the process at the end of the shift, leaves staff drained.

One shift, charge nurse Alisha Barker recalls it was simply overwhelming in the number of patients who had to be proned.

Alisha: This was a couple of weeks back where it was a hellacious shift and we had a lot of patients to prone or unprone at the beginning of the shift, and then we had to flip the patients back over, like prone them again at the end of the shift. We were just exhausted, and it's 5:30 p.m., 6:00 p.m. We're all a bit delirious by this point, just going from room to room to the next room to prone these patients.

Stephen: As they moved from room to room to room end of shift, the mood was becoming increasingly brittle. Physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion had already exacted so greater toll on Barker's colleagues. She had to find a way to rally the troops to get them through these last pronings.

Alisha: So by the third patient, we're proning and we're all just like almost in tears. We don't want to be doing this anymore. I got the bright idea to start reading the instructions in a different accent, and it completely changed the mood of the room.

And everybody was talking back to me in their own version of the Russian accent that I was doing, and there was no other place in the world that I would have rather been in that moment than in that room with my coworkers, because we turned a very dismal, miserable situation into something that was really, really fun.

Stephen: Caring for a patient who can't communicate because they are sedated with a breathing tube down their throat leads some nurses, like charge nurse Cat Coe, to worry that they are losing sight of who they are caring for because of the very nature of the treatment they are called on to provide.

Cat: I think it's more the nature of the disease makes it pretty impossible for us on the MICU because a lot of them desat if they talk. So that means that basically their blood oxygen levels go dangerously low if they talk or eat or sit up or, God forbid, stand up. So I think it is hard to form relationships with them when some of them really can't talk without desating.

And this is not just with COVID, but I think in the ICU in general, it can be very hard because the patients are so sick that they can't communicate very well. It can be very hard to have any concept of what they are like as a human being outside of the hospital. And I think that that can actually be dangerous for a nurse to stop seeing a patient's humanness. You know what I mean?

Stephen: Nurses facilitating family members by using an iPad to allow them to talk to their sedated, intubated loved one can be one way of getting around relatives not being permitted to visit COVID patients due to safety policies.

But, Coe says, FaceTiming can also open the door to secondary trauma when it comes to being the only physically present witness to someone's death while assisting relatives in saying goodbye virtually.

Cat: Witnessing FaceTime conversations that would normally be a private conversation with families around the patient's bed, we're now facilitating these conversations and oftentimes having to stay in the room to deal with whatever technical difficulties. Or if it's a Zoom meeting, admitting another person to the meeting, or whatever. And we're witnessing these goodbye conversations or the families trying to get the patient to engage in a "Do you want to keep going?" sort of conversation and/or decision.

I think being in earshot of that often these days is just heavy. It's sad. It's so sad to see these families on FaceTime not able to touch their loved one and trying to figure out what is the best thing to do for them.

Stephen: Nurse Megan Diehl has also struggled with the realities of supporting relatives through the process of shifting a patient to comfort care when those relatives can only be present virtually. Helping loved ones say goodbye online, she says, as difficult as it is for them, is uniquely challenging for nurses who have to attend to facilitate these farewells.

For weeks, while a patient has been sedated and on a ventilator to battle the pulmonary ravages of the virus, they have been reduced to a silent slumbering form. Suddenly, in their last moments of life, as families say goodbye, the nurse learns who the patient was and how much they mattered to their loved one.

Megan: Being on a FaceTime call with a family, they will talk about the type of person that their loved one is, or they'll share stories. And it's different with each patient, but a lot of patients that I've done FaceTime calls with while they're saying goodbye . . . Death takes a little bit of time sometimes, and so we stay there the whole time to be able to give medications and do things and, with FaceTime, make sure the camera is pointed the right direction and things like that.

And they'll sit there and talk through stories about, "Oh, so-and-so, remember when we did this?" or talk about other family members that have also passed, like, "Oh, when you see grandma, you guys can do this together."

Stephen: If a patient up to that point has been a mix of numbers, heart rate, ventilator settings, and drug administration, all the medical information that has to be monitored to assess their health, suddenly all that falls away.

Megan: But it turns it from looking at those things into looking at the person, and it kind of takes all those numbers and things away. So you don't have to worry about any of that other stuff as well, which is part of it. When someone is passing away, you don't care what their heart rate is doing because you don't have to fix it. You don't care about ventilator settings because you're not going to add oxygen. You're not going to intervene and do treatments.

So instead of thinking about what treatments you can do, you don't have to think about that. You just think about whether or not they're comfortable and then you listen to the family. I think it's that, taking away everything else and making them more of a person, that makes it really hard.

You have to displace yourself from it almost because otherwise you can't handle it. Especially if you're in a PAPR, which we usually are. If you cry in a PAPR, you can't get to it. There's no sticking a tissue up underneath it and wiping your tears away. You're just crying, so it's so awkward. And then you don't want the family to see you crying because you're supposed to be strong for them too.

Stephen: Key to these online farewells are the stands on which the iPads rest.

Megan: We have some now that are on little stands and I usually try to get one of those. Or if it's something like that, I try to get one that I'm not holding because if you need to give medications or do anything, you want to have your hands free and not be like, "I'm going to lay you down for a second. Hold on."

So there's a little stand with the wheels on it and it has a bendy arm. And so you set it up and get them to where they can see the patient. And we'll call in a couple of different people, so it's three or four different little boxes on the screen, and then they're talking to their loved one and telling stories about them and telling stories about them.

Stephen: It's a delicate virtual process, trying to bring the family as close to the patient as possible.

Megan: So if the family can't be there, which usually they can't, we'll take the breathing tube out. Everything is turned off. We can put the monitor so where we can see the numbers, but it's not going to beep at us and make noises and everything because you don't want to distract from the moment.

And then I try to get to where they're just looking at their family member, like pretty close to their face. I don't usually do a full body. You want them to be close enough to see them.

Stephen: Relatives sometimes ask a Nurse us to physically connect with their loved one. Hold their hand, comb back a lock of hair from their temple, touch their cheek so they can say goodbye to them in a physical sense, leaving the nurse as the most intimate witness to their relative's departure.

Megan: It's things like that. The family will ask you to do things because they can't. And so you kind of have to step in and be there if that's what they want from you. Other people will just talk and you just tell them . . . you walk them through the steps of what's going to happen, how things are going to go. I always tell them, "If you think they look uncomfortable, let me know. We can give more medication."

Stephen: In such an intimate, painful space, a nurse finds herself a spectator to a farewell that feels almost unbearable.

Megan: It just breaks your heart to see these people. It's just us. It's a nurse there and then their family talking to them, which is better than nothing, but I can't imagine saying goodbye over a FaceTime call, being so far away or giving that to someone else to be there while my loved one died.

Stephen: In the face of so much trauma and so many patients' deaths, many nurses have found themselves for the first time seeking help. Whether that has meant connecting with the University of Utah's Resiliency Center or an independent therapist, Barker stresses how important being straight with yourself and others about your mental health needs has been during the pandemic.

Alisha: It's more so how are we dealing with the day-to-day? How are we getting through each day? And I will have some thoughts about that. How am I going to be when this is all over? I don't think there's anything wrong with needing to seek help from outside sources, whether that's therapy or medications or a combination of different resources. I think there's absolutely no shame.

And I think that one of the positives of this is that mental health will be more accepted and regarded and there will hopefully be less shame with people having mental health issues, being open about them, and dealing with them.

Some of the most meaningful conversations that I've had with my coworkers lately have been about being honest about how we're really feeling and how we're doing and how we're coping. And I feel like it benefits everybody when you are honest about how you're really doing and the things that you are doing to help cope with it.

Stephen: Simply through the process of reaching out for advice, for help, for sounding boards to answer her own doubts, Diehl found colleagues in the same troubled place as her.

Megan: I don't know. You have to step back and analyze yourself more than you did before. So I came to a point a couple weeks ago where I was like, "Maybe I need to start talking to someone. Maybe I need to start thinking about therapy or thinking about a way to figure out how to organize my emotions and how to deal with some of the stuff that I'm going through."

And I talked to another one of my coworkers about it because she was at that point. I had texted her about something and she had kind of let it out to me that she was not feeling okay emotionally. She told me that she had found someone to talk to that she really liked. And so I've started to try to reach out and find someone to talk to as well.

I reached out to a nurse we used to work with who was really open about going to therapy, and this was pre-COVID. I reached out to her and I was like, "How did you find someone that you felt comfortable talking to?" She gave me a bunch of information and she said, "There have probably been 10 other MICU staff that have reached out to me about this."

Stephen: Those last eight months taught many nurses that the defenses of gallows humor and camaraderie was simply no longer adequate to deal with the added stresses of the pandemic, particularly when it came to witnessing another way of saying farewell to a patient by a loved one that in some senses was even more grueling than FaceTiming, says Cat Coe.

Cat: I think the part that is still really heavy is seeing the families and just seeing them . . . if it's a COVID patient, they can't go in the room. I think it's one now that is allowed to stand outside the room while the patient is passing away, and seeing them have to do that is really heartbreaking.

I often put myself in their shoes and think how hard it would be to stay outside the room and how sad I would be to watch my mother, father, brother, whoever, pass away alone. It's heavy. I think a lot of us are going to therapy right now.

Stephen: One shift when the pandemic surge was pressing down on the MICU, Coe experienced an unfortunate personal record. She accompanied three patients down to the morgue, two of them having died from COVID-19 complications.

Cat: So there were I think two patient transporters, and they were super nice. I mean, they were just like, "Wow, we'll be back, and we'll be back." I don't know. I mean, it's part of the job. We go to the morgue a lot as MICU nurses. We have one of the highest death rates in the hospital, if not the highest, and we're all very familiar with the death packet.

We've had nurses float to us before, like nurses from other units, not familiar with the death packet or haven't had to fill it out in a year and a half or something, and we're all like, "Welcome to MICU."

Stephen: Charge nurse Alisha Barker finds a sense of comfort in the process of escorting a patient on their final journey.

Alisha: It's a very strange journey. I never have gotten used to it in my 13 years of doing this job. There are two transporters who bring a special cart up and we place the patient's body in what's called a post-mortem bag. And we place them on the cart and then we put a sheet over the cart.

So you wouldn't necessarily really know what it was if you were just a lay person walking through the hospital and you saw this cart with a sheet over it being pushed by two people. And then it's followed by the nurse because you've got to go and provide some paperwork and log the patient into the morgue.

Stephen: For Barker, each time she goes to turn away from having brought a patient to this way station before the journey that will lead to their final resting place, she can't quite let go.

Alisha: It's weird. You leave them there, and I always have this hesitation when you leave. Once you do your paperwork, you can leave and the transporters will take care of that patient's body from there. They just will put it in a holding area until the funeral home that the family has selected comes to pick the patient's body up.

And I always have this weird hesitation. It's almost like I'm dropping my kid off to school and I want to stay and look at them through the window or something, or the doorway. There's a weird hesitation there, and you just kind of have to take an inhale and an exhale and release and walk back to the unit.

Stephen: By the beginning of February 2021, like an eternally building tsunami that had finally crushed down onto land only to begin to recede leaving so much damage in its wake, the numbers of new daily infections began to drop along with the numbers of new hospitalizations.

The healthcare system, all its providers and nurses, both ICU and general floor, felt the first signs of pulling back from a brink that at moments had seemed close to, but never quite did, overwhelm it. Not that things would ever be quite the same, including at the MICU where familiar faces had departed or announced their decision to move on.

Charge nurse Cat Coe resigned, her last shift on January 2. She left for a change of pace working at U of U Health's ski injury clinic at the Snowbird Resort. There, she could continue working in critical care, but with the added bonus of backcountry skiing before work and hill laps during her lunch break.

Charge nurse Alisha Barker said she too was leaving in April to pursue her ambition of becoming a nurse anesthetist. If there's one thing that COVID-19 taught her, it's that now is the time to live your dreams.

For those that remain at the MICU, like newly appointed charge nurse Megan Diehl, they look forward to that growing glint of light on the horizon when the pandemic can finally be declared under control.

That December 10 morning, as the safety briefing heralded yet another change of shift, Diehl prepared to wrap up on B50. She considered the impending ramifications of vaccinations both soon and long term, and yet still she managed to joke.

Megan: Maybe. It seems so far away, because they say we're getting a vaccine, but that's only June or July maybe and that's so far away. So I don't know. Maybe eventually we'll be back to floating all over the hospital and complaining about floating instead of complaining about COVID. I don't know.

Stephen: And for some nurses, like 23-year-old Reagan Lowe, who began her career as a nurse in the MICU in May 2020, there are personal celebrations to look forward to. On May 1, 2021, she's getting married at the Highland Gardens in Utah County. Her fiancé is an electrical engineer and he's always careful, she says, to pay attention to how she's coping with work.

Reagan: Sometimes it's kind of hard to describe things the way he . . . like, when he describes his job and the math he has to understand, it goes straight over my head. And it's the same when I'm talking about certain procedures and situations and trying to explain. But also, it's nice to just . . . he's a break from the COVID. A breath of fresh air. It's kind of nice to have someone that just doesn't feel it and see it the same way.

Stephen: Whether it's in Lowe's commitment to her marital future as well as a nurse or Barker's decision to realize her long-held dreams, it's the resilience of the human spirit in the face of adversity that lingers most in the mind after months of talking to nurses at University Hospital's Medical ICU.

But there's a sense in something that charge nurse Barker argues that speaks to nurses, not only at the MICU, not only in University Hospital and so many other clinics and hospitals within The U's system, but indeed nurses across the globe. Even at the lowest points of the pandemic, she says, she and her colleagues were still able to find the strength to go on.

Alisha: Where you can find resilience in the pit of despair, in the bottom of feeling like you absolutely can't go on, and then all of a sudden you're laughing and having a great time, I'm like, "Wow, that's a miracle." That's a miracle of the human spirit, I think. And I hope that my coworkers can recognize that.

Yes, it's very hard and there are things that aren't fair about this and things that will make you angry if you let them, if you think about them and wish that things were being dealt with differently. There are always things we wish that could be different, but we also have the capacity to be extremely resilient in this.

And so, hopefully, people are experiencing their ability to do that and to realize that they're a lot stronger than they thought they were and that we're making it through.

Mitch: Next time on "Unit On The Brink," December 14, a mass vaccination effort in the state begins for frontline workers. Charge nurse Christy Mulder was the first person in Utah to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. We share her story and how the promise of vaccination was providing not only a boost of morale for the medical workers at University Hospital, but a glimmer of hope for a return to normalcy for everyone in the state, whatever form that new normal may take. Join us next time for "Unit On The Brink," Episode 9, "Keeping the Faith."

And if you'd like to see images from our visit to the MICU from the extremely talented photographer Brian Jones, take a look in the show notes for a link to the Keep Breathing multimedia story brought by Stephen Dark and designed by Stace Hasegawa.

Clinical is part of The Scope Presents network and brought to you by University of Utah Health. If you liked what you heard, please be sure to subscribe and share with your friends.

And if you haven't yet, why not give us a rating on Stitcher or Apple Podcasts? Those ratings really help new podcasts like ours and it makes our day to read them.

And to all the nurses, doctors, admins, interpreters, operators, technicians, and all of the other hospital employees out there, we know you're listening and we want to hear from you. Feel free to share at our listener line at 1-601-55SCOPE. Again, that's 1-601-55SCOPE. Or email us at hello@thescoperadio.com.

Clinical is produced by me, Mitch Sears, and Stephen Dark. Music in this episode by ANBR, Vortex, the Dave Roy Collective, Ian Post, Laurel Violet, and Yehezkel Raz.

And of course, a heartfelt thanks to the men and women who have shared their stories with all of us and fight to this very day to keep each and every one of us safe.

Mitch: From University of Utah Health and The Scope Presents, this is Clinical.

I'm Mitch Sears, producer for The Scope Radio, and you're listening to Episode 7 of our series "Unit on the Brink." This is a multi-part story that is told in order. If you haven't listened to our previous episodes yet, we highly recommend you go back and start with Episode 1 in your podcast app.

Unit on the Brink is a story that intimately explores the firsthand experience of medical frontline workers during the coronavirus pandemic. The stories that are shared are raw and occasionally deal with personal trauma. Listener discretion is advised. This is Part 7 of "Unit on the Brink."

Welcome back to "Unit on the Brink," voices from the COVID frontline. We last spoke with frontline workers at the medical intensive care unit at the end of September 2020. At that point, there was a looming fear of a sharp increase in cases that could potentially overwhelm the state's medical system. The surge.

Back then, case numbers of coronavirus infections and hospitalizations were higher than they had been in the summer, averaging between 1,000 and 1,200 daily cases but at least the numbers seem to be holding steady. Yet just a few weeks after our previous episode ended, the situation started to take a turn.

Male: In Utah, COVID patients flooding ICUs. Doctors say they're now two-thirds full statewide, a few patients away from what they're calling unmanageable.

Female 1: This morning, Utah's doctors are sending an urgent warning. Hospitals are running out of ICU beds.

Female 2: We don't have the ability to continue to provide in unlimited amounts of care.

Female 1: The Utah Hospital Association telling the governor, they're less than two weeks away from having to ration care.

Female 2: If you have a heart attack or you get into trauma and all the beds are full, I mean, if you have a stroke, we can't care for you.

Mitch: On October 22, 2020, the Utah Department of Health reported a record number of hospitalizations for the state, 314, with more than a third of those cases needing critical care.

According to the Department of Health, the state's rising case count of COVID-19 patients was quickly becoming unsustainable. University Hospital was soon forced to reopen B-50, the COVID overflow unit, yet COVID hospitalizations continued to rise.

Throughout November and December, Utah broke one record after another. Two thousand, 3,000, 4,000 new cases a day with a record 5,662 infections on November 22. The surge that healthcare workers had been so anxiously awaiting for all of 2020 had finally arrived.

In December, Stephen Dark, a photographer, and myself were given the rare opportunity to visit the Medical Intensive Care Unit to experience firsthand what conditions in the unit were like during the winter surge. Over the next two episodes, we'll share what was going on in the hearts and minds of frontline workers during the time of ever-increasing pressure in the unit working to persevere against the wave of new patients.

A quick editor's note, you may notice a change in audio quality from our recordings and interviews from inside the unit due to safety protocols and the background noise that comes from a very busy unit as well as the sound of our photographer's equipment. With that all in mind, we now take you back to the University Hospital Medical Intensive Care Unit with Episode 7 here with the COVID.

Stephen: By 7 a.m., more than a dozen nurses and healthcare assistants in scrubs, masks, and protective eyewear were finding their way to the conference room at the medical ICU on the fourth floor of University Hospital for the morning safety briefing.

Amidst the din of caffeinated voices and laughter, they found seats at a long table or stood against the wall all the while looking down the list of current patients in the unit.

Nurse: Okay. Welcome, everyone.

Stephen: The charge nurse who had led the night shift started going through the patient roster stating their diagnosis and a thumbnail sketch with their medical status. Nurses picked their patients. If they worked the day before, they took their patient assignment back for continuity of care. As he went down the list, the charge nurse repeated the same diagnosis.

Nurse: Two, we have COVID on the vent volume control, 70% on [inaudible 00:05:04] is prone. In seven, we have here with COVID is prone and they're on the vent volume control 60%. Nine just came here from the floor with COVID. Three, we have he's here with the COVID. In six, we have he's here with the COVID. In 14, he's got COVID. Fifteen is here with COVID. Yes, 16 is Covid, 18 is here with the COVID.

Stephen: Out of 24 patients that night, 17 had COVID-19 and some were losing the battle.

Nurse: In 10 we have 78-year-old guy and we're just trying to address goals of care. And in 12 we have 70 years old DNR, but intubation is okay and she is walking that line in there. DNR, DNI. We're letting him eat and stuff and kind of moving in a palliative direction.

Stephen: Even as COVID-19's presence seem to weigh ever heavier in the room, the charge nurse still managed to crack a joke.

Nurse: Seventeen I left off his diagnosis. Can anyone guess?

Nurses: COVID

Nurse: Yeah, COVID.

Stephen: The unit was dealing with the aftershocks of Thanksgiving. Utah having achieved notoriety of sorts as ranking one of the highest states for holiday road trips despite nationwide advisories not to travel. And there were still the weeks after Christmas and new year to come with their anticipated further peaks in new infections.

Veteran MICU charge nurse Cat Coe was particularly concerned about how young nurses new to the unit were coping with the onslaught of COVID patients.

Nurse Coe: I can't imagine coming in . . . I think the ones that I worry about the most are the ones who are either new grads or they're fresh from the floor. Like they worked on the floor for a year, and now they're just starting to work on MICU and they're like in their early 20s.

And I just can't imagine coming in to all of this with very little experience and trying to make sense of it all and like being under the impression that this is normal, because like that's what they're training in. They're training in this environment. I don't know. I like if it were me, I would have been real worried about myself.

Stephen: One young nurse was finishing her night shift that December morning. Post-shift May 2020 nursing school graduate Reagan Lowe, who had chosen the MICU to cut her teeth on, was struggling with an even bigger decision, her choice of career.

Nurse Lowe: Sometimes I get overwhelmed. I think part of being a new grad is being kind of scared to show up to work and kind of scared that you'll miss something. Thursdays, where I dread coming. And sometimes I would worry is this going to be my life? Did I choose a career where I'm going to dread every day? Is it going to be a job that I don't want to come to anymore?

And it's hard, especially because I love the people I work with and I hate like feeling that way. So in those moments, I do kind of worry that I'm regretting it, and then I remind myself of all of the opportunities that I have to learn and to grow and to develop skills and interpersonal skills. And I feel really lucky to be here even when it's a terrible day. Even when it sucks to show up, I feel really lucky that I'm able to because I know a lot of people would kill for an ICU job straight out of school.

Stephen: As a certified nursing assistant in the last year of nursing college, Lowe had worked at the MICU in a support capacity for nurses. The MICU nurse would typically care for two patients a shift and often get to know them quite well since MICU patients tended to be there for weeks, if not months.

Lowe on the other hand, as a CNA, might cover up to 8 to 12 patient rooms a shift. So preparing a deceased patient she didn't have a deep connection with or their trip to the morgue was something she had become used to. Being a nurse, however, brought a starkly different perspective.

Nurse Lowe: But as a nurse, you have such a different responsibility and level of interaction with the patients where it is much more involved.

So as a nurse, helping people with death and through death and their families, I wish we could have more family around those situations, but as a nurse, you're there giving them the medications to make them comfortable as they've pass or you're holding their hand as they pass. And it's your patient and you know everything about them. You've built a relationship with them on a deeper level than you typically do as an aide. You kind of help with the process of passing more. You're a lot more involved in the process of passing instead of the process after passing.

I just think I'm lucky to have been a CNA before I was a nurse. Otherwise, I feel like I would have been shell-shocked starting as a nurse and seeing so much death, but it's still hard.

And my friends will kind of ask me like, "Oh, have you seen a dead body?" I'm like, "I've seen dozens. I've touched more than 50 dead bodies. I don't even know how many I have helped clean up." People kind of are shocked by that, and like I work in an ICU at a level one trauma hospital, I see death.

Stephen: As a child, Lowe's parents shared with her the joys and the challenges of nursing. Her father began his career as a nurse before later going to medical school, becoming an anesthesiologist.

Nurse Lowe: He was initially a nurse and worked as a nurse while he was in med school, and I think I was born while he was still a nurse. And I think a lot of it too was my mom telling me, "Oh, your dad's helping the people. Your dad's like, maybe dad's not home, but it's because he's taking care of people so that they can go home to their families."

Stephen: Like so many of her colleagues, Lowe came to nursing out of a desire to help others.

Nurse Lowe: And I like healthcare. I like taking care of people. I like being able to help people. And then my senior year of high school, I got my CNA while I was doing classes and loved that. I loved it so much. Just like watching what the nurses did. I want to do that. I want to help people. I want to make a difference in people's lives.

And so it was kind of just like all these steps that just kind of fell into place that allowed me to do it, and like all the steps felt right and I liked it so here I am.

Stephen: She had to learn extremely fast how to negotiate that line between compassion and self-care that all nurses learn. Although only those who started from the spring of 2020 onwards did so under the increasingly unrelenting weight at the pandemic.

Nurse Lowe: It's kind of like this tight rope where you're trying to balance like on this one little spot of the perfect amount of compassion and the perfect amount of personal protection.

You teeter one side and you care too much and you're over-involved and you teeter the other side and you seem cold. You worry that your patient thinks you don't care. You have to try to figure out how do I make them comfortable and let them know that I'm here without it coming home with me every night and it's hard. Sorry, sorry.

Stephen: No, you're fine. Take your . . .

Nurse Lowe: I'm sorry. Just a little tired.

Stephen: It's just the most exhausting time . . .

Nurse Lowe: It is.

Stephen: . . . in your life, I would imagine.

Nurse Lowe: Mm-hmm. And especially being a new grad and it's already an overwhelming job and you're learning so much and just watching people suffer is something that's really hard for me, but it also motivates me to be a better nurse to minimize that suffering.

Because we get patients that like remind me of like my family or remind me of a friend I know or who are young and or who are disabled and don't understand what's happening or don't know what COVID even is. And you're trying to tell them to lay on their stomach so that they breathe better and it doesn't make any sense to them, but you're not supposed to identify with that.

And they teach us in nursing school that you're not supposed to really focus on those patients. You're not supposed to focus on that resemblance because it hits too close to home and it can cause issues and can muddy the waters of patient and nurse relationship.

Stephen: That doesn't get in the way though of the many small acts of compassion that a nurse like Lowe brings to her vocation. In the mid-evening hours of December 9, Lowe had cared for a young man with a developmental disability.

Nurse Lowe: I feel like the ones that are difficult are often very rewarding. Not that he was difficult to care for, it's difficult for me to understand exactly what he's going through. Such an easy and kind and patient patient. And just putting myself in his shoes and being like, what are the things that are probably going to scare him the most? How can I prepare him for the things that are going to scare him? How can I mitigate the fear? How can I make him comfortable? I ended up finding . . . he wanted to watch this cartoon. And luckily our burn unit had it because they have pediatric patients, so I got the movie for him and played it for him. And he likes "My Little Pony."

Music: My little pony, my little pony.

Nurse Lowe: So I found the movie for him, and I figured out in a different room how to play it just because I didn't want to just get it in there and not be able to play it because I felt like that would be so mean. And so I figured out how to play this movie for him and then just, even just like the little things. He just wanted a bite of a graham cracker, so he had a bite of a graham cracker and watched this cartoon and went to bed. And that's all he needed was just a little bit of handholding and a little bit of patience and somebody to figure out what would make him comfortable.

Stephen: This small gesture of concern brought the patient joy.

Nurse Lowe: It made him happy. The laugh he gave me when I set it up, he got so excited and he let out this little squeal. It makes it all worth it.

Stephen: So he has COVID. Is that right?

Nurse Lowe: He does.

Stephen: And kind where is he in sort of the spectrum of sort of the evolution of the disease?

Nurse Lowe: So he's on the high-flow nasal cannula. So it's kind of other than our BiPAP and CPAP kind of the last line before we would need to intubate him. And our provider was saying really just don't want to because that would be traumatizing for him physically and emotionally because he wouldn't understand what we were doing.

So he was just kind of on that edge where we need him to lay on his stomach so it'll help his oxygen, but if he doesn't tolerate it and he gets worse, he might need to be intubated and have a breathing tube.

But for some of these patients that can be a death sentence or they're just on it for so long that they don't really get better or they have permanent deficits. And so it's this fine line of how long do we wait before we do these interventions? Are they going to help long term, or are they just going to be a death sentence?

Stephen: Charge nurse Robby Thurman joined the MICU in 2013. As with Lowe, the medical ICU was his first full-time nursing position. Spend some time at the MICU and it's quickly apparent, Thurman is one of the gang exchanging repertoire with other nurses, always upbeat and optimistic and clearly passionate about where he works.

Nurse Thurman: I get to be intellectually challenged all the time. I'm always learning things. I always have the ability to go and learn new things every day, you know, for a long time, still try to, you know, make a note of like something they learned new, like that day.

There's so much to know, and I really enjoy being able to spend more time with my patients even though like they can't talk all the time. I still like enjoy being able to spend time with them, just care for them. Taking care of them and turning them and giving them their baths and the camaraderie like the family that we have as a staff is great.

I don't know how we've been able to do it. We have such a high turnover with staff. We've always had people leaving for school and other things, but I feel like the list of phenomenal nurses that I've worked with just keeps getting longer because everyone's leaving but we still keep getting these great nurses that come here and become part of our family and I don't know.

Stephen: But even his buoyant, lively personality and his love for his profession was facing increasing challenges from the grinding weight of the pandemic.

Nurse Thurman: I don't know. It doesn't feel like these are some of the harder things that I've had to do. I get my, you know, in my weekend and I'm, you know, physically drained, I'm mentally exhausted, and I just don't have any more emotions to give sometimes, you know, where it's trying to provide for these patients physically.

When families are there, it's great because I don't become responsible for almost like caring for them emotionally, you know, because they have their family members and their loved ones that they are there with. But I feel like a lot of times we as nurses get tasked with caring for patients emotionally now too where we become the ones that they can talk to.

And it's like I've held more people's hand dying than I've ever wanted to. I don't like being the person in the room when patients die. If their family's there, I can do it, but I've done it more times than I have ever even thought I would have to, you know, because nobody deserves to die alone.

Stephen: Caring for patients who are approaching death, especially when they are younger than you expect, can undermine even battle hardy veterans like nurse Megan Diehl. By early December, she felt angry and frustrated at the isolation her unit was experiencing.

Nurse Diehl: And I feel like the general public is sick of COVID. I mean, we're all sick of COVID. Everyone is. People want to get together with their families for Thanksgiving and for Christmas and all of this, but when it comes down to it, it's not gone yet and it's more of a threat now I feel than it was before.

And I don't know if I just hit a point where it changed for me, but I feel more stressed about my family and about people that I care about now getting COVID than I did six months ago, which is weird. I don't know why.

Stephen: The spiking case numbers, the pressure on the number of available beds for coronavirus patients, the lack of attention among some members of the public to protecting themselves and each other from contagion, it all added up for nurses struggling to cope with the surge in COVID-19 patients. And then sometimes just like for nurse Lowe, a patient's death will strike too close to home.

Nurse Lowe: I had a patient a couple of weeks ago that was younger than my parents and had no other health problems and, you know, he was overweight and that was it. And he was younger than my parents. And I think I don't know what happened, I don't know how it happened, but I looked at him and it was like, I looked at how sick he was. I'm like, I saw for the first time I think I saw like this could be my dad and I think that's kind of what broke me.

And I don't know why it took so long, but it was awful. I just remember thinking like this person's five years younger than my parents, less of a health history than my parents, and is here and is just so sick just from COVID.

Stephen: The patient who had so underscored for her the vulnerability of her mother and father unexpectedly died after she had completed a shift. When she returned to the unit, she learned of his demise. She reached out to her parents.

Nurse Lowe: I texted them the next morning and be like, yeah, that guy that I told you about, he died. I don't know if that's what triggered me into this like less sense of security and this like constant anxiety with my family, but it was really hard. It was really rough. And I think a lot of us have, you know, if not that patient, there's another one where you have an experience and it just like changes. It changes you.

Stephen: Part of the wearing, grinding nature of the pandemic for MICU nurses Coe explains was that they never got to see patients recover. When nurses and providers talk about saves, that's to some degree what they mean, namely, patients who they've managed to turn away from the brink of becoming another SARS-CoV-2 casualty.

As soon as attendings felt a patient was well enough, they were quickly moved off the unit to go to B-50 or elsewhere in the hospital to make space for new cases.

Nurse Coe: The saves are happening, they just, unfortunately, have been happening less on MICU and had been moving to B-50. Now that has changed just very recently, just in the last like 10 days. B-50 is operating as more of a super sick ICU patient unit. They are taking patients that have to be proned still.

And when a patient's being proned, they are still very tenuous. The outlook is very much in question if they're still getting proned. That might start to level the playing field a little bit as far as like if we can keep some of our successes on MICU. Unfortunately, I don't think . . . I think that we will still have to push those less acute patients out somewhere because MICU is the epicenter of all of this and the sickest patients probably need to be there so that they're closest to our doctors.

Stephen: Which begged a question, where do you find joy when there seemingly is none to be had? For Coe, it was on B-50.

Nurse Coe: An example of like an aha moment seeing a patient get better, that made me feel like, "Wow, I am doing something that's really good." Unfortunately, I'm just not seeing that on MICU enough. I had a patient who had been on MICU very sick for at least a month. She had finally made her way up to B-50.

She was trached. She was being fed through a feeding tube through her nose, and patients get trached typically after they've been intubated for a long time to kind of preserve their trachea somewhat, and it also gives them a chance to like start moving their mouth again. And anyway, her trache had been downsized several times, so we're kind of moving in the direction of the trache being removed completely.

And she was at the point where the trache was small enough that she could put what we call a speaking valve on it and use that to start to make words again. And we're talking for like the first time in like five or six weeks and start using her mouth to chew ice chips again.

Stephen: That may not sound like much, but for a COVID-19 patient who's starting down the road to recovery, chewing ice chips is huge. A speech therapist came in while Coe was at the patient's bedside to teach her how to use the speaking valve.

The patient called a much-loved relative and Coe got to listen into the call. While the relative was overwhelmed, the patient was too exhausted to muster any real signs of emotion.

Nurse Coe: She wasn't very emotional. She was just trying to make words but hearing that family member on the other end of the line and her reaction to hearing the patient's voice for the first time in over a month and like that indication that she was getting better was huge. And I think I really needed that as a nurse. Her family obviously really needed that, but I also really needed that to like kind of remind me that some of these people are getting better.

Stephen: As the year headed towards the Christmas festivities, the growing pressure on the unit came not only from the medical needs of the COVID-19 patients but also from the MICU's role as a place of last medical resort. Robby Thurman saw firsthand of exhaustion from COVID-19 care, then coupled with other MICU functions only added the cumulative stress and exhaustion of his colleagues, including physicians.

Nurse Thurman: And our poor doctor who was on overnight, he was on service that week, and so Sunday day he was up all day doing his job. And then, you know, sometimes, you know, most times when they're on at nights, they can, you know, do their thing, take a nap, wake up to phone calls. This poor guy never got to lay down. They took like seven rapid responses from the floor. So like the nurse feels like they're unsafe on the floor, but they're not coding it. So they still have a heartbeat, so breathing on their own, but there's like, oh no.

So they call rapid response. We took seven of those, and I think they had a couple other admissions from other places. And then, so he was up all night and then up all day. Like we're just having more of those experiences where it's like I don't know how much more we can do.

We had beds, but it's like how much staff. I think that's the thing is, you know, a bed's great when we can throw them, we fill them all up but we're all getting tired. We're all working. I'm used to working overtime. I'll pick up extra so my wife can stay home with the kids so she doesn't have to work outside the home.

So I'm used to the, you know, one or two extra shifts a month and we're all tired. And, you know, we're all going to keep doing it because it's like we're there to care for patients. But I feel like it's like we're all getting a little more, we're all just getting more tired as it goes on.

Stephen: Try as he might, as the winter nights drew in and the yuletide season beckoned, optimism is proving evermore elusive, but still in those moments when it was just him and a patient when he could provide that intimate gesture of concern, of love for his fellow man, he found some glimmer of hope.

Nurse Thurman: I think while it's been harder to be cautiously optimistic, like it's just those little things of, you know, even if it's for a little bit like getting people off their breathing tube so they can have a conversation with their family. We've had a lot of patients where they've just had to be reintubated, but they're having, you know, FaceTime calls at night with family or just spending time in a patient's room, combing out their hair and braiding it. It's those little things that I get to do. I have the privilege of doing.

Mitch: Next time on Unit on the Brink we return to that shift change in the medical ICU in December. We witness what happens when a giant wave of cases finally begins to receive, leaving casualties in its wake. Meanwhile, news of widespread vaccine rollouts begin to show a glimmer of hope that one day the unit may return to normal, whatever normal looks like now.

Female 2: Like they say, we're getting a vaccine, but that's so far away. Maybe eventually we'll be back to floating all over the hospital and complaining about floating instead of complaining about COVID. I don't know.

Mitch: Join us next time for Episode 8, "Trial by Fire." And if you'd like to see images from our visit to the MICU from the extremely talented photographer, Bryan Jones, take a look in the show notes for a link to the "Keep Breathing" multimedia story written by Stephen Dark and designed by Stace Hasegawa.

Clinical is part of The Scope Presents network and brought to you by University of Utah Health. If you liked what you heard, please be sure to subscribe and share with your friends. And if you haven't yet, why not give us a rating on Stitcher or Apple Podcasts? Those ratings really help new podcasts like ours, and it makes our day to read them.

And to all the nurses, doctors, admins, interpreters, operators, technicians, and all the other hospital employees out there, we know you're listening, and we want to hear from you. Feel free to share at our listener line at 1-601-55SCOPE. Again, that's 1-601-55SCOPE. Or email us at hello@thescoperadio.com.

Clinical is produced by me, Mitch Sears, and Stephen Dark. Music in this episode by Vortex, the David Roy Collective, Ian Post, ANBR, Rousseau Music, and Tristan Barton. Audio news clips from CNBC.

And of course our heartfelt thanks to the men and women who have shared their stories with all of us and fight to this very day to keep each and every one of us safe.

Mitch: From University of Utah Health and The Scope Presents, this is Clinical.

I'm Mitch Sears, producer with The Scope Radio, and you're listening to Episode 6 of our series "Unit on the Brink." This is a multi-part story told in order, and if you haven't listened to the previous episodes yet, we highly recommend you go back and start with Episode 1 in your podcast app. For everyone else, this is Part 6 of our story, "Unit on the Brink."

For many, summer is a season of rest and renewal, a time for vacation and travel, to get outdoors and enjoy the warm weather. And inside the University Hospital Medical Intensive Care Unit, the summer months are typically their offseason, with low numbers of critical patients. MICU staff would lend a hand to other units that see an increase in patients during the summer, like the neuro and burn units.

Summer was always a few months to take a breath and collect themselves before flu season begins in the fall. The MICU is the unit tasked with taking care of the most severe cases of influenza during their "on" season. Typically, the unit will see an increase in influenza hospitalizations starting in October, with cases usually reaching their peak in February. By April or May, the unit can finally relax as the rate of flu infections tapers off, and they can clear their beds of patients with life threatening respiratory complications.

But the summer of 2020 proved to be completely different. The coronavirus pandemic persisted through June, July, and August. And in Utah, the numbers of COVID-19-positive patients climbed even higher than what we had seen earlier in the spring, and the hospitalization numbers were following suit.

While many of the patients arriving to the unit eventually do get well, heal, and leave, only returning for the occasional clinical visit, the unit is dealing with many more severely sick patients than they are used to treating this time of year. This summer, rather than a few months' reprieve, the unit found itself dealing with many more severely sick patients than they were used to treating during the season.

This year, it was the MICU that was in need of reinforcements from other units in the hospital during the summer. And on top of that, flu season was fast approaching. What would this winter look like in the unit if a wave of influenza patients were to come, if COVID cases were still filling their beds?

Throughout our series, you've heard the raw tales of the healthcare workers holding the frontline against the novel coronavirus. But the stories that you've heard so far, they were from interviews conducted in April and May of 2020, the early months of COVID-19. After six months of treating the victims of the global pandemic, how were they holding up?

Three nurses from the unit agreed to discuss what happened over the summer. Veteran charge nurse Alisha Barker, nurse Megan Diehl, and nurse Juan Paulino Rodriguez, who joined the unit on Halloween 2019. The three sat down in a University of Utah Health conference room on a Wednesday morning in early September, Rodriguez fresh off the night shift. Over three hours, they revealed to us what it's like being at one of the medical epicenters of COVID-19 in Utah, during a peak in the virus crisis, discussing their fears, anguish and frustration, along with their love for the profession.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Presented by Clinical and written by Stephen Dark, this is our sixth and final episode of the season, "Waiting to Exhale."

Stephen: On July the 26th, newly appointed charge nurse Cat Coe wrote an email about how much had changed at the University Hospital Medical Intensive Care Unit since early spring. Back then, the first suspected COVID-positive patients, some struggling with acute respiratory distress syndrome, or ARDS, had started trickling in to await diagnosis. But by the summer months of June and July, the MICU was being hit harder by COVID-19 than at any prior point in the pandemic.

Cat: The beginning of this pandemic was very different from what it has become in the MICU in the last six weeks. Nurses, HCAs, and some doctors are getting very tired and burned out. We have seen so much death this summer both from COVID and other things. And the MICU is full every day, which never happens in July. Many patients are getting proned, and I've never seen so many people with such bad ARDS all at once.

Stephen: Nurse Megan Diehl agrees with her 1,000%.

Megan: We can put our PPE on in like 10 seconds now. It's impressive the change of just easy . . . like, putting on your PAPR and tying everything. So the mentality has changed a lot, and we are exhausted, burnt out. There's a lot of people that, you know, "I can't. I just can't come in today." And so they'll call off work, or they'll talk to our management and be like, "I just can't deal with it today." And that totally makes sense. We're feeling a lot of the burnout from it, because we've been doing this the whole time. And people are just like, "Well, I'm tired of COVID."

Stephen: It's not just COVID-19 they're tired of.

Alisha: And it's been a lot. It's just a lot of death lately.

Cat: Mm-hmm. It's hard.

Juan: Yeah.

Stephen: Summers before COVID were quiet enough for MICU staff to unwind, to float to other units, Barker says. But with the spike in cases in June and July, they never seemed to turn a corner, to have a chance to recharge.

Alisha: It's just a constant feeling of being tired, but knowing that you have to keep going. And it's almost like it's . . . again, it's kind of like this destabilizing feeling in the pit of your stomach, where you know you're okay because you know what it looks like. We've been working in this environment for several months now, and we're accustomed to it. However, there's not really an end in sight that we know of. And so it's just not a comfortable feeling. But we're all getting accustomed to being out of our comfort zone. But that's exhausting.

Stephen: Before the pandemic, death was a more sporadic visitor to the unit. But with the virus, its presence was painfully more evident. Nurse Juan Paulino Rodriguez recalls a day when the unit experienced three or four deaths in just one shift, including one just as exhausted nurses and doctors were handing over their patients to the next shift.

Juan: There were these lulls where, yeah, you would lose a patient, but then you would have so many recover, and then you'd have another patient that you would lose, and then you would recover because you would get to see other patients go home. But with COVID, it's constant.

Stephen: Diehl recalled one shift change where a young nurse blamed herself for a patient's death, even though she had fought as hard as she could in that patient's corner.

Megan: She had been fighting for this patient all day, and she's such a good nurse. And she just broke down when the patient started coding. And I was trying to talk to her, and there were a bunch of us trying to comfort her, because she felt like she had failed. Like, she had been working with this patient all day and trying to get, "Can we try this? Can we do this?"

Stephen: Whether new or veteran, the number of deaths of COVID and non-COVID patients exacted a brutal price on already exhausted staff.

Megan: You see it wear on everyone. I mean, someone that's been here for 7 years or, I don't know, 15-something, some crazy amount of years that Alisha has been here, but even for this just brand-new nurse, the constant death just really gets to you.

And even with our non-COVID patients, we've had a really solid amount of people that are not COVID patients but are dying in very traumatic ways, or they come in and they're so sick and it's not something that we usually experience during the summer.

Stephen: And when multiple patients die during one shift, it's overwhelming, Barker says. Yet somehow, the mind finds a way through, at least at the moment.

Alisha: Just speaking from many years of experience, when shifts like that happen, you feel disconnected. And I think it's almost like a coping mechanism so that you can survive and that you can continue to function and complete your shift. You have to turn yourself off so that you don't break down and cry.

And I have had those shifts where I have broken down and cried, and I've had to go in the locker room and try and get myself together in the bathroom stall. And it's even worse when someone comes and checks on you to see if you're okay. The moment someone shows you compassion or gives you that look or touches your arm, you just like break down again, so you're like, "Don't talk to me. Don't. Don't."

And then you've got to go home from your shift and you've got to be that person who you are at home when you're completely wrecked. I've had shifts where I've called my husband and I've said, "It's been a terrible day. I can't come home right after work because I can't help you put our daughters to bed. I can't do that. And so I need you to put them to bed and then I will come home."

Stephen: She drives to a park by her home.

Alisha: I will just pull into the parking lot, and I'll just sit there. And for me, personally, again, where I have to turn it off so that I can still function at work. I sit there, and I try and turn myself back on again so that I can feel it. I try to cry, and sometimes I can, and sometimes I can't. So I literally just sit there and I try and conjure up the feelings. I think through the shift, and I'm trying not to berate myself of where I thought I failed.

Because when your patient does code, you think back and you're like, "What could I have done differently? How could I have prevented it? What did I miss?" And so you're trying to not beat yourself up about it so that you can return to work again, and do the same thing the next day or whenever you have to go back to work.

Stephen: And when those setbacks happen, exhausted nurses have to confront their own emotional limits. Diehl talks about an extremely healthy male patient, who when she had to start turning up his oxygen, knew immediately what that meant and broke down.

Megan: And then I got a patient who had COVID, looks pretty healthy. I mean, I had to get a different blood pressure cuff because his muscles were so big in his arms. He was a healthy guy. And taking him as a patient after that death, and then starting to have to turn his oxygen up, he started crying, and I went into the hallway and just cried, because I couldn't . . . I was already . . . you're like already broken down, and then the littlest thing can just push you and just knock you over into a place where you're not in a good headspace.

So it's just . . . it's like you feel one thing, and then even if something slightly bad happens, or your patient cries, and you have to be strong for them, and you can't . . . I don't know. It was a really hard day.

Stephen: When patients experience those first moments when the virus' hardest truths start to hit home, Barker tries to fortify them by shifting their attention. "Focus on what matters to you," she tells patients battling to comprehend what they may face with the virus. She recalls one scared woman who missed her husband and was waiting to be determined COVID negative or positive.

Alisha: I could tell she was very scared, and her husband couldn't be with her and her family couldn't be there. And I just remember looking her in the eye and just being like, "I am going to take excellent care of you. You are in the right place. And I need you to stay in a mental-positive space. I need you to try and just think about your loved ones and your family. And you're going to be okay. It's going to be okay."

And I hate saying it's going to be okay when you don't know if it's going to be okay or not. In the end, I believe it's going to be okay for all of us, whether which way it goes. But I just make sure that they know and that they believe we are going to take excellent care of you. But I just tell them the patients who are able to stay in a more positive mental space are the ones that I see that do better.

If you can hang on to the reason why you want to get better . . . and sometimes I'll make them. I'm like, "Tell me why you want to get better. Tell me what you're grateful for in this moment right now. Tell me who you're going to get better for." So if I can get them to make that switch versus out of panic mode and into this moment where, like, "Yes, I'm going to make it through this," then I feel like it just changes a little bit. It changes the atmosphere for, who knows, maybe only five minutes, but in that moment, I have them with me and I'm like, "We're going to take care of you."

Stephen: If some patients break down as they realize the severity of what they may face, others refuse to accept it at all. Barker brings out the reinforcements in such cases, namely her voice.

Can you give me an example of that voice? I know it's hard.

Alisha: Stephen, your oxygen is 82% right now. I need to put this mask on you. If I don't, your oxygen saturation could drop more, and you might stop breathing. So I can put this on you now, or we can see if you stop breathing later. You decide.

That's my sort of mom voice.

Stephen: And has anybody actually not done what you've told them?

Alisha: It usually is like, "Uh, okay." I don't remember a point where someone didn't do what I wanted them to do when I was talking to them in that way.

Stephen: A change in tone of voice is not the only tool a nurse can brandish from their professional toolbox. For some MICU staff members, there's a sense of almost vocational renewal in the simple act of holding an iPad so relatives unable to visit the unit can communicate with their loved one, even if the latter can't speak.

Megan: Then you're like, "Can they see them? Am I tilting the right way?" I have so many other things that I can be doing, but you're bringing the family comfort by going out of your way and adding a step to your day so that they can FaceTime with their loved one and say prayers or talk or even just look at everything that's happening so that they can grasp, with the treatment that we're doing, how sick this person is, and that they can just actually visualize their loved one that you're taking care of.

Alisha: Yeah, it's a chance for them to see their loved one and everything that they're going through and everything that we're doing. Yeah, I do love when the patients are able to converse with the family on FaceTime. I love FaceTiming with patients and families. I will stay in the room and hang out and FaceTime with the patient, with their family, just because their eyes light up and the families are just so happy just to be seeing them and talking to them.

And I do, I find myself even when I have other things that I have to go be doing, I'll be doing stuff in the room just so I can be a part of that energy. I find that little things like that and little things that we do that the patients would like or find comforting, I really focus in on those things, and I try to be mindful and present when those things are happening, because those are little things that get me through a shift or a difficult time, or when I'm feeling stressed or pressured. It's those little things that help to relieve me and to remind me why I love being a nurse.

Stephen: The pressures of a climbing COVID-19-positive patient census have demanded a new approach to how many sick patients nurses need to care for each shift. Typically, a MICU nurse would have two patients to care for, one very sick, the other stable. But as more COVID patients filled up negative air pressure rooms shifting the majority of patients from non-COVID to COVID, Diehl found herself caring for two extremely ill patients at the same time.

Megan: Usually, those patients would be . . . if you were having a really sick patient, you would pair them with someone who is pretty stable, pretty okay. But when we had as many COVID patients as we did, it was, "You've got a patient that's paralyzed and proned and tubed, and things really could go wrong at any minute. And your other patient is kind of on the borderline of maybe being intubated, and that might not go very well either."

So you had this sense of stress and just peaking, and then also kind of a sense of dread because your workload had completely changed, and then you were responsible for two really sick patients. And the rest of the unit was pretty much the same way.

And so, even if you needed someone to help you, there were so many times, and I know all of us have felt this, where you're in your room and you just kind of stick your head out because you don't want to take off all your PPE and go out of the room, and there's no one outside at the nurse's station or anywhere around that could help you. And you're like, "All right. Well, I guess I'll figure it out."

So we had lots of COVID, and then we didn't have enough nurses, and then everything changed. And it was just COVID peaked and our stress level peaked too.

Stephen: There was a keen awareness of some colleagues who weren't faring as well as they would like.

Alisha: The sad side of this is that while we're laughing and trying to do things together outside of work, and people are going hiking together, and all these other really good things that are happening, we also know that there are staff members that are really struggling. Our manager will say, "I've got a couple people on my radar that I'm trying to keep tabs on, that I know they're in a dark place."

Stephen: As the MICU staggered towards the end of July, staff concerns inevitably began to include the impending influenza season. As Diehl talks through the implications of what flu and COVID might look like in the fall, despite the brightly lit room, it starts to feel claustrophobic.

Megan: And really, sometimes it feels like in the MICU lately these waves are coming and are literally just crashing into us over and over and over. And the winter is our busy season. Each ICU, I think, has a season that is busy for them. And so it'll be really interesting to figure out how to have all these COVID patients, and then also have the flu, and then the regular stuff that we usually get in the winter.

Juan: And I just see the whole rollout process too. "Is it the flu? Is it the COVID? Is it both?"

Alisha: I know. It's just precautions for everyone.

Juan: Everybody, yeah.

Stephen: What would both look like?

Juan: I have no idea.

Megan: A patient that has both?

Stephen: Yeah.

Megan: I'm terrified to think about that.

Juan: Yeah, because just seeing what COVID is doing and then . . .

Alisha: And then having . . .

Juan: The flu on top of it . . . We've already seen what the flu can do just on its own in healthy individuals too, so . . .

Stephen: If public support had helped keep spirits up in the unit through the first and easy months of the pandemic, once the MICU's walls echoed with rooms full of struggling COVID patients, that same support seemed in some quarters increasingly muted. Indeed, the days of the lockdown when they had experienced so many public displays of gratitude, Rodriguez says, had by then faded away to something that felt at times almost unpleasant.

Juan: At the start of this, like I . . . because working nights, you just get off, you go to the store, you're still in full uniform. At the beginning, it was like, "Oh, thank you for everything you do. Thank you for everything you do," to now when people see . . . I don't like going to the store anymore in my scrubs, because now when they see you, people will give you that stare, they'll step back, or they will go to turn down the aisle when they see you, and then they're like, "Nope," and then go the other way. And it's like, "Whatever. I don't want to talk to anybody right now anyway."

Alisha: I'd be like, "Thank you for socially distancing."

Juan: Yeah, exactly.

Megan: But we're so much safer at work than we are anywhere else.

Alisha: Oh, yeah.

Megan: I feel so much more comfortable in a COVID room than I do out in the public.

Alisha: At the grocery store. Yeah.

Stephen: Some wounds of rejection, particularly those experienced by colleagues, by those standing on the frontline with you, hurt the most, remain the most incomprehensible.

Megan: There's one person in particular who had found another hobby, another source of joy other than just being at work, and COVID happened and everything shut down, and this person couldn't go do that anymore. And then once things started to reopen, he was able to go back to that place. And once they found out that he worked in the COVID ICU, they asked him not to return.

And I think it's people . . . people look at us and they take a step back when we say we work in the COVID ICU. And we feel safe. Other people don't always feel safe around us, and I think people need to recognize that that hurts. And the implications that it can have, and how it makes us worry about someone that we may not have been super close with before, but we're looking out for each other. I'm so doing so poorly with this.

Alisha: No, you're doing great.

Megan: It's so hard. People don't get that, and they put us in this box, this COVID box, and this possible infection and all this. We're still people who we need an outlet. And for the people that don't have that, we are worried about them. And it's hard. I don't know. There's a couple people in our unit that are having those experiences, like, "Hey, my friends are getting together, but they don't want me to come." And that sucks.

Stephen: So you are you are being discriminated against by some.

Megan: I would say yeah, in a sense.

Alisha: Yeah, I worry about that with my . . . I have two school-aged children, and the parents, they . . . I mean, for the most part, it's been good, but I worry about that, that they're being left out of things because they live with me and because of what I do.

Stephen: Barker has struggled to find a nanny for her children. No one she talked to was comfortable coming into her home given where she worked. At the same time, she was also nervous at the thought of hiring a stranger who might bring COVID into their family.

Barker told her mother about her problem. Five days later, her mother called back. "I'm calling to apply for your open nanny position," she said. A relieved Barker was so moved she couldn't speak and cried for several minutes. Rodriguez had similar problems.

Juan: Yeah, even on the medical side, I have a niece who has a brain tumor and we've been dealing with it for the last three years, and she was very young. And when COVID started, the clinic that she goes to, they asked her, "Do you have known exposures?" to my sister. And she was like, "No, but my brother, he's a nurse. He works in the COVID ICU, and he hasn't been around often, and we do everything that we need to." And they basically like, "Okay, well, you need to do your appointments virtually now." And it's like how can you do this virtually? The exposure risk is minimal. Like, it's . . .

Megan: Frustrating. It's frustrating.

Juan: Yeah. When she told me, I'm like, "So what? I can't go around her? Is that what the hospital is saying? Is that what they're telling you to do?" It's frustrating, yeah.

Megan: It's because people are telling us that we're heroes. And at the beginning, it was, "Oh, you guys are such heroes. This is so great. Thank you for all that you're doing," but like, "Don't be around me, and I don't want you around people that I know," or, "You can't come here because you're such a hero."

It's a weird thing. We were supported, but it's support from afar. Or we were supported, and now we're kind of being put in this other bubble. So it's a weird feeling. It sucks.

Juan: Yeah, it does.

Megan: But it's sucks together. I mean, we all have that where we've had these experiences, or we know someone that has, and it's really affected us too. And so we share in that together, and we'll still get together outside of work because we're not afraid to be around each other.

Stephen: MICU staff try to support each other, whether it's organizing a staff exercise meet in Sugar House Park or taking time to check in on personal projects. There's a table designated for sharing, where staff like Barker can simply visit, chat, and ask questions.

Alisha: You see some people sitting at the share table, you go and you sit, and you're like, "Okay, what are we talking about? What's going on?" You'll get little clues as to how your coworkers or how people are doing just by what we share at the share table, what we talk about. And so often there we just try and say . . . like, we talk about personal things.

Stephen: Barker will ask Diehl how work is proceeding on her new home.

Alisha: Like, "Hey, how's your house renovation going?" or . . . yeah.

Megan: It hurts me inside.

Alisha: Yeah.

Megan: But that's exactly it. We lean on each other, and we know when someone's had a hard shift, because usually we're right there with them, or we've been stuck in our rooms all night and we're like, "Man, I haven't seen you this whole time and I know you've had just as crappy as a night as I have." So we're I think really good at talking about how things are going and really good at making each other laugh. We really support each other, I think.

Stephen: By the end of a summer unlike any other in living memory, Utah had experienced not only the ebbs and flows of a global pandemic, but also hurricane-force winds battering the streets of its capital. With no end in sight to the crisis, staff wearily steeled themselves for the days to come.

At the end of September, the Beehive State hit its highest ever daily infection numbers for the pandemic, over 1,400 cases. In the MICU, after a brief lull in the run up to Labor Day, numbers yet again began to climb.

As nurses, healthcare assistants, and providers rallied once more to treat the rising number of cases, they drew on each other for morale and support along with their own resources, histories, and quirky personalities. Tired and burned out as many were, they needed all they could find, as the virus laid siege on their patients day after day after day.

Charge nurse Alisha Barker's disciplined, unflinching approach was seeded on the softball fields of Central Utah when she was an ace pitcher coached by her devoted father.

Recently appointed charge nurse, Cat Coe has her years of mountaineering and guiding with all the fear and stress she learned to negotiate to steady her resolve before the onslaught of extremely sick patients.

If healthcare assistant Cornelio Morales' loving approach to caring for patients with disabilities and their loved ones was ingrained in him from the many years he and his wife have cared for their bedridden daughter Cathy, there was also his 11 years working at this unit to guide him.

Unit respiratory specialist Lynn Keenan, MD, had both her family's deep ancestral roots in medicine and 5:00 a.m. jogs, when the peace and promise of Salt Lake's morning streets awaited her.

And if nurse Megan Diehl had thought that a business major would have been too stressful for her, nursing through a pandemic brought to the fore her compassion and her natural qualities as a leader.

And for the very worst cases this unit would face, they can always rely on reinforcements from the CV ICU, professionals like nurse Rebecca Brim, who has walked the gray line of life and death for most of her long career and will do whatever she can to help bring her patients back from the brink.

None of them, however, have faced quite the emotional vortex that consumed nurse Juan Paulino Rodriguez when his grandfather, a man he called Appa, was diagnosed with the virus and cared for by his own unit. Rodriguez was quarantined for most of Appa's time at the unit, only to be there in his last hours to say goodbye and hold the iPad so that many of his relatives might also say their farewells. We'll tell that story in a future episode.

But however long this pandemic would run, whatever the fate of the unit's patients and their committed staff, they remained unbowed before the brunt of COVID's relentless pressures.

The MICU staff knew they had each other to rely on as they confronted the virus' wrath and worked towards the end of all this, whenever that end would come.

Mitch: And that brings us to today, the first week of October 2020. The pandemic continues. The frontline workers at University Hospital are still fighting every day to save the lives of some of the very sickest members of our community. In the past week, we've seen record high numbers of new positive cases in the state, and the overflow unit at the hospital has been reopened.

This has been a story of loss and the pressure that this pandemic has brought to bear on those tasked with treating the sick. But it has also been a story of bravery, dedication, and the saves that make the job worthwhile. A tale of the grace and strength of those who devote their lives to healing others. The story of one state, one hospital, one unit, and the ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances, coming together and supporting one another through these unprecedented times.

While this may be the conclusion of our first season, this is not the end of our story. We'll be staying in touch with the medical professionals and provide updates as they happen.

And be sure to stay tuned. The Clinical team has been hard at work on a series of "Unit on the Brink" specials coming out over the next few months that aim to share other perspectives of this story, such as the way the virus has impacted Utah's Latinx community, the perspective of a COVID-19 patient themselves who came back from ECMO. And we'll hear from the resiliency center, the people that helped take care of the mental well-being of our frontline workers.

Stephen and I want to take a moment to thank the people who, without their help, this series wouldn't be possible.

First, the professionals who were willing to share their often difficult stories with all of us and helped give a voice to the experience of those in the unit working to hold the line against the virus -- Alisha Barker, Rebecca Brim, Catherine Coe, Megan Diehl, Dr. Lynn Keenan, Cornelio Morales, and Juan Paulino Rodriguez.

A thank you to MICU nurse manager Naydean Reed, for her assistance and guidance on this project.

Our gratitude to the support of the rest of our team -- Cathy, Scott, Chloe, Alex, Charlie, and Jessica.

And of course, thanks to you, our listeners. Without your support, none of this would be possible.

Clinical is part of The Scope Presents network, and brought to you by University of Utah Health. If you liked what you heard, please be sure to subscribe and share with your friends. And if you haven't yet, why not give us a rating on Stitcher or Apple Podcast? Those ratings really help new podcasts like ours, and it really makes our day to read them.

And to all the nurses, doctors, admins, interpreters, operators, technicians, and all the other hospital employees out there, we know you're listening and we want to hear from you. Do you have a frontline story or a message for us or for the people in our story? Feel free to share at our listener line at 1-601-55SCOPE. Again, that's 1-601-55SCOPE. Or email us directly at hello@thescoperadio.com.

And finally, be sure to visit our podcast companion site at thescoperadio.com/clinicalpodcast, and click on "Voices from the Frontline. There, you can find bios and portraits of the professionals in our story, see what it looks like in the MICU, as well as bonus content we hope enhances your podcast experience. Again, that's thescoperadio.com/clinicalpodcast, and click on "Voices from the Frontline.

Clinical is produced by me, Mitch Sears, and Stephen Dark. Be sure to check out the rest of The Scope's growing catalogue of shows at thescoperadio.com, including Bundle of Hers and Who Cares About Men's Health.

Music in this episode by ANBR, the David Roy Collective, Ian Post, and Yehezkel Raz.

And of course, a heartfelt thanks to the men and women who have shared their stories with all of us and fight to this very day to keep each and every one of us safe.

Interviewer: Children with autism are more likely to end up in the hospital unnecessarily than children without autism. We'll examine a research study that gives parents and physicians some valuable information and lessons about this topic next on The Scope.

Announcer: Medical news and research from University of Utah physicians and specialists you can use for a happier and healthier life. You're listening to the Scope.

Interviewer: Dr. Paul Carbone is an associate professor of pediatrics that specializes in autism and related developmental disabilities. You were involved in a recent study called Ambulatory Care Sensitive Hospitalizations Among Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, and what I'm essentially getting out of this is that children with autism are more likely than children without to end up in the hospital unnecessarily. Is that really what you found?

Dr. Carbone: I think that's true, we looked at a cohort, or group, of children with autism who were hospitalized and we compared them to children in two other groups who did not have autism. We looked at 14 conditions for which they might be hospitalized, we call them ambulatory care sensitive conditions. That's a fancy way of saying that, for this particular condition, if you got good care in your outpatient setting in your doctor's office, you would be less likely to be hospitalized for that condition. So what we found is that children with autism, over half of all of their admissions were for ambulatory care sensitive conditions. Over half were potentially preventable.

Interviewer: So for a parent, this is really concerning because their child's ending up in the hospital where it could have been prevented at an earlier stage. Am I gathering that correctly?

Dr. Carbone: That is correct.

Interviewer: And for physicians that should be concerning because we're missing a lot of opportunities to keep children out of the hospital.

Dr. Carbone: That's what we hope that the findings of these studies indicate that there is an opportunity here to better address these groups of conditions in children with autism in the outpatient setting.

Interviewer: All right, so for parents and physicians, what are some of these conditions that if my child has it or if a child is in my office with it that maybe I should be paying a little closer attention to keep them out of the hospital.

Dr. Carbone: The group of conditions that we studied were derived from various organizations who have defined these conditions because tracking them turns out to be pretty important. Just to give you an idea, ambulatory care sensitive conditions comprise about a third of all hospitalizations in the United States. They cost about four billion dollars.

Interviewer: That's significant.

Dr. Carbone: They count for a million hospital days. So if we're trying to do better care and are trying to do it in a cost efficient way, these conditions are the money. So the conditions that we looked at were things like asthma, pneumonia, constipation, dehydration, epilepsy or seizure disorder, underweight, and mental health conditions which comprise a number of them like anxiety and mood disorder.

Interviewer: So what's happening here? Why are they going out of the office to the hospital with these particular conditions?

Dr. Carbone: Well that's a great question, and these data that we looked at, remember, we're just looking at a group of patients who are already hospitalized. So we can't follow these patients from the outpatient setting into the inpatient setting to look at what are the factors involved that got them into the hospital. All we can say here is that these conditions are more commonly seen in children with autism as a cause of their hospitalization compared with children without autism. But, we can always speculate because that's what we do when we come up with data.

About a quarter of all admissions in children with autism in the United States are for mental health conditions. That is an amazing statistic because the data set that we used called the Kids in Patient Database, or the KID, looks at hospitals across the country. We looked at over two million admissions. A quarter of all admissions for children with autism are for mental health conditions which is amazing because these hospitals aren't psychiatric hospitals, they're medical hospitals. So it really represents almost a failure of the system that somebody would be admitted to the hospital for a mental health condition.

Interviewer: Okay.

Dr. Carbone: So what I think one of the most important implications is we need to address these issues in a proactive way in the office, before they come to a head and the child eventually becomes, what I think probably happened with most of these admissions for mental health conditions, is the child becomes aggressive. Can't be managed at home, is then admitted and then stays in the hospital for that.

Interviewer: What about some of these other conditions?

Dr. Carbone: The other conditions, one that was very prevalent that drove a lot of the differences that we saw between the groups was epilepsy. And that's not entirely surprising because children with autism have a higher rate of epilepsy compared to children without autism. So we know that it's there. The challenge, I think, in the outpatient setting is how do we manage it so that we can reduce some of these admissions, and I think in children with autism if you think about them they're delightful people but they have deficits in social communication and they do a lot of repetitive behaviors. They need sameness all the time.

So how that manifests in the management of epilepsy is that I have a drug that I would use for this patient because of the type of seizure that he has, but he won't take that medicine because he doesn't take pills. So then I have to think of something else. Or, the child is simply not adherent with the medicine thereby necessitating a hospitalization because it gets out of control. So that's just one aspect of treating children with autism. They're not worse, they're not better, they're just different. So you have to have a plan B, a plan C, and a plan D for how to manage their conditions because sometimes they don't want to do plan A.

Interviewer: Sure, or plan B or C for that matter.

Dr. Carbone: Correct

Interviewer: So I think you gave us a couple of good takeaways for physicians, have those extra plans. What about parents. What should parents take away from this conversation?

Dr. Carbone: Well, I think that again, because of the very nature of these conditions, because they are ambulatory care sensitive, we want parents to focus on that relationship that they have with their pediatrician or primary care doctor in the office. And to me, I think it's really about a partnership. I've been taking care of kids in an ambulatory care setting in a clinic here at the university called the Neurobehavior Home Program for quite a while and we really focus on developing a relationship with families so they feel comfortable in telling us everything.

We give them a little bit more time. Our system of care is a bit different and I think that that's one of the problems in the system that we have. Most physicians see patients for five minutes and we really need that to be longer for patients with autism because it may take them 10 or 15 minutes just to get into the exam room.

Interviewer: And at the end of it all, that extra time could result in a child not needing to go to the hospital at some point.

Dr. Carbone: I can address many conditions in a visit, whereas my other colleagues in pediatric medicine can only address one per visit. So it allows me to sort of address some of these ambulatory care sensitive conditions and make sure we're managing them so that they don't escalate to where we're stuck and we have to go the hospital.

Interviewer: So what's next?

Dr. Carbone: These data are the first time that anything like this has been published about ambulatory care sensitive conditions in people with autism. I think they'll be helpful because since they were published in 2009, these data, now a newer version of the KID is coming out, so it presents an opportunity to follow this over time.

We've done a lot of things to help pediatricians take better care of children in the office setting since 2009. There's something called the Autism Treatment Network. The American Academy of Pediatrics has given a lot of guidance to pediatricians on how to manage these conditions in the office. So it will be fun to see over time if we're able to move the needle on the percentage of potentially preventable conditions.

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