“You’re working in an environment that’s not safe for anybody.”įor 14 days, Lea remained intubated. “That can have detrimental effects on the health care workers,” McNab says. “If I’m treating someone who has a heart attack, they can’t give me the heart attack.” But with COVID-19, patients are literally shedding the disease into the air. “COVID is everyone’s problem,” McNab says. Anytime a physician or nurse tended to Lea during the 45 days he was in the hospital, they wore gowns, gloves, an N95 mask and a face shield. The unit had special ventilation and negative pressure, so air in the unit is sucked out to prevent it from escaping into the rest of the hospital. “We had built an isolation ward for COVID,” McNab says. ![]() Lea was the first patient at Freeman Hospital to test positive for COVID-19, but the hospital was ready. ![]() “I don’t remember anything else until three weeks later.” “The last thing I remember was getting up Monday night,” Lea says. A few days later, he felt worse and told his wife he was having trouble breathing. Lea first started feeling ill on the drive home after he and his wife, LaVetta, visited family in Mississippi in early March. The air around you is 21% oxygen, and we were giving him 100% oxygen.” “Within 24 hours his breathing went from not the best to having to be intubated emergently to control his oxygenation. Robert McNab (Top Doctors runner up in Hospitalists for Joplin), who led Lea’s care. “He came in with profound shortness of breath,” says Dr. So when Lea showed up at Freeman Hospital March 23 and had to spend 14 days on a ventilator, doctors didn’t think the octogenarian would pull through. ![]() According to the Center for Disease Control, eight out of ten deaths reported in the United States have been in adults 65 years old or older. At 84, Wallace Lea falls into the most at-risk category when it comes to COVID-19.
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