By Jennifer Levitz and Paul Berger, 11 Apr 2020
Her father was 83 years old, sweating and gasping for breath. Nancy Hopkins leaned down and rubbed his arm just before paramedics put him into an ambulance. “I’ll be with you every step of the way,” Ms. Hopkins promised him.
That was as close as she would ever again get to her dad. When she arrived at the nearby hospital in Conway, S.C., that evening in mid-March, she learned she could not go in because of visitor restrictions imposed during the coronavirus pandemic. She sat alone in her car in the hospital parking lot for hours, crying when she finally drove off.
Her father, Robert McCord, a retired livestock dealer, was sick with the coronavirus and lay for 14 days in an isolation room on the top floor of Conway Medical Center. When he neared death on April 1, Ms. Hopkins said goodbye through a phone, placed in a plastic bag and held to his ear by a nurse.
“It has been the biggest challenge of my life, knowing I couldn’t be there,” says Ms. Hopkins, who is 59 and a schoolteacher. “Because my father depended on me.”
A brutal hallmark of the pandemic is the way it isolates its victims even in their final moments. Patients die alone in hospital rooms, cut off from their spouses, children, siblings and often their pastors or rabbis. The emotional end-of-life moments, if they happen at all, unfold over an electronic tablet or phone, with a stranger serving as an intermediary.
“I struggle with saying words like ‘unfair,’ but that is what it really feels like,” says David “Michael” Dudley Jr. He said goodbye to his 61-year-old father, who was dying from the new coronavirus, over a Zoom videoconference on March 31. “You’re not only telling me my dad is not going to recover,” he says, “but I can’t even be there to say anything. I’ve got to do it in probably the most impersonal way possible.”
The elder Mr. Dudley, a charter bus driver, had woken up with a cough one week earlier and was on a ventilator in a Baltimore hospital. The younger Mr. Dudley, 36, didn’t know if his father could hear him, but he had things he wanted to say, mainly “I love you.” He strained to get the words out in the awkward group call with other relatives, and doctors and nurses in the hospital room.
“I squeezed one in at the end,” he says.
Such video calls have become so necessary for patients and their families in the Covid-19 crisis that Littleton Adventist Hospital in Colorado is aiming to have an iPad in every room shortly, says Stephen Guyer, the hospital’s chaplain.
And Covid Tech Connect, a nonprofit set up in March, is aiming to eventually put 10,000 tablets in hospitals and nursing homes. So far, about 2,500 donated tablets have been pledged, and the group has raised more than $125,000 toward a $1 million goal. The first shipments were set to go out by the end of this week.
Sara Rodell, one of the group’s founders, says she was inspired by a text message on March 27 from a friend who is a nurse who needed help sourcing tablets that would allow dying patients to say goodbye to their families. “This just really got me,” says Ms. Rodell.
Some of the Covid-19 patients seem unaware they are isolated, while others understand, says the Rev. Michael Mercier, the director of spiritual care for Lifespan, a health system in Rhode Island. “I have never seen as many patients cry when I am praying with them,” he says, adding that they feel cut off from family.
There and at many hospitals, the chaplains now often pray at patients’ doors to avoid picking up the virus. (WSJ)
