“I remember thinking, ‘oh my god it’s starting to hit here,'” Dr. Grant Niskanen, said.
Holly Montjoy, the co-chair for the inpatient Covid Response Team, reflects on what it was like when that first case came in.
“You just felt super fearful for the community.”
The number of cases started out slow in Klamath County, only getting between one and three a day. The first hospitalization didn’t come until the end of March.
“She was in the hospital for I believe 35 days and was quite ill during that time,” Dr. Niskanen said.
Klamath County continued that trend of only a few cases, for more than half of the first part of the pandemic. Dr. Niskanen says they had prepared for the surge that everyone was talking about, but it never came. That is until November hit.
“It went to 5 or 8, then 10 or 12, and then in a period of a month it turned up to 60 or 70 positive cases in a day.”
Once they started to see case numbers increase, hospitalizations increased and the number of people who were passing away was also increasing.
“The fear shifted from the fear of the unknown to the fear of reality,” R.N. Christie Wiles, Director of the Covid Unit, said.
“It was awful.” Dr. Montjoy said. “It was just incredible taxing to just see so many people who shouldn’t be dying this early, dying from the disease.”
Dr. Niskanen says it was hard being a health professional, and not knowing what to do. That, coupled with the fact that information kept changing, he says they just did anything they could
“In our sicker patients we were just always grasping for straws,” Dr. Niskanen said. “These patients were just so sick at times that we would try just about everything to do something to get them better.”
Dr. Montjoy says it was just a feeling of helplessness.
Toward the end of November, Sky Lakes Medical Center was the first hospital in southern Oregon to reach its ICU capacity. They opened up a second unit but it was hard to keep up with the volume of people that were needing to be hospitalized.
“We’re staffed for a certain volume of patients on any given day and time of year and this really maxed us out,” Wiles said.
That last through the end of December into early January when vaccinations started getting administered. Dr. Niskanen says mentally for him, and so many other staffers at the hospital, things started to take a turn for the better.
“Our numbers started to drop a little bit and that’s the first time, I first thought maybe this is going to happen.”
When they look back at the last year, they remember the painful moments that will never be forgotten.
“I just remember the ICU nurse embracing me and we just cried together.
But right now, they feel hopeful and are proud of where they are. They’ve seen resilience and grit like never before, and realize they’re capable of much more than they ever thought.
“I think while it may have become a bit of a cliché saying, we’re all in this together is really how we’ve been able to get through it is together,” Wiles said.
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