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The Nurse On the Frightening Frontline
posted (March 31, 2020)
Last night you listened in as Jules Vasquez spoke by phone with Ishelle Miller, a Belizean-American nurse on the COVID-19 frontlines of New York City.

You heard the horror in her voice as she described the events of recent and upcoming weeks as a dark, dark, time. And tonight we bring you the remainder of that conversation.

This time Miller recounts the emotional toll families experience not being allowed to visit their ailing loved ones and the complete breakdowns they can suffer during the regulation 5-minute visit with a family member dying of the Coronavirus.

Ishelle Miller, Belizean-American Nurse in Brooklyn, New York
"You cannot do anything else to help them and you wish you could, and dying alone. I've never seen my hospital so overcrowded, I've never seen my colleagues so overwhelmed, I've never seen so many people say they want to quit because they can't take it anymore. I've never seen so many people die. I've been in this profession so long and I know death comes but it's never something that I could get used to seeing."

Jules Vasquez:
"Just explain to me what is the protocol for visitation of an ill person and what is the situation when they pass on, I mean in terms of their interaction with their loved ones who want to say goodbye."

Ishelle Miller
"So right now nobody is, even if your confirmed coronavirus positive, nobody is allowed a visitor, nobody. Even in the maternity ward, one parent is allowed to be there with the baby the mother and the father can't be there, one parent. If somebody is dying and they're actively dying and they know for sure that this person is gonna die in an hour they will call the family members and one family member can come for five minutes, five minutes. To see that person, one family member can come for 5 minutes, now with the deaths yesterday I saw, I was so busy but I got to see one family member end up coming on time, the husband died and so the wife came and she was only allowed 5 minutes and she broke down and so the security is so strict that they had to call security for her because she didn't want to leave and I understand where she's coming from because how can you just give me five minutes to see my husband and he's dead but that is the rules that they have to stick by to try and control the infection rate especially in people that are already immunocompromised on this unit."

Jules Vasquez:
"Now explain to me the ventilator situation, what type of unit is it and what is the availability of usage of it, Like are you guys running short of ventilators or is it foreseeable that you will."

Ishelle Miller
"So I work with a med-search unit that also has a stroke unit and a surgical step-down unit and usually, we have like 4 patients on the ventilators at any given time in that unit right now it's like double or triple that amount so the hospital at this point, at some point they will end up running out of ventilators if they don't get more because there are so many patients that they have to intubate and put on a ventilator because they are going into respiratory distress, like yesterday alone there were five intubations on my floor, five new intubations which means, five new patients went into respiratory distress, and five new ventilators need to be placed on them so I don't even know how they're gonna keep up."

"Every patient in the ICU is corona positive at my institution and we have two separate ICU's and a surgical intensive care unit and every patient is on a ventilator so the hospital is running out of ventilators so I'm hoping that the governor could secure more ventilators for these hospitals because they're being used at a rapid rate."

"Everybody needs to quarantine themselves, stay home, do not go outside try to get the mask the surgical mask, wash your hands, stay away from people as much as people think like a lot of people think this is vacation, this is not vacation that's why it's spreading, New York is already overpopulated the more you can stay away from people it's best for you because you never know. You might not show symptoms immediately when you get in contact with somebody but symptoms show up and sometimes it takes five days for your symptoms to start showing and then you could transmit it to somebody else. It just takes one person to transmit it to ten people, imagine that and then start doing the multiplication."

"I wish that that person hadn't brought it back to Belize you know because you don't even know who all is infected at this point."

"My thing to my Belizean people is to take this coronavirus seriously."

"So people stay home please stay away from other people this is not a joke, no partying, no bars no hanging out this is not a joke this is a serious, serious, thing."

"Mostly the most ones I'm seeing dying right now are people over the age of 40. 40 and up the majority with pre-existing conditions one of them didn't have any pre-existing conditions. And I think by the time they realize they have it take it seriously and come to the hospital it was a bit too late. It was so long progressed that they couldn't reverse the damage."

Ishelle Miller is the wife of the world-famous boxer, Jarrell Big Baby Miller and the sister of former UDP City councilor Jason Edwards.

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