In old Western movies, there was often a scene in which a bugle blared as the cavalry soldiers on horseback galloped to a crisis and saved the day. We popcorn munchers would cheer.
That’s how I felt on the morning of Nov. 30 when I heard the good news. It was like a blaring bugle announcing a medical-response team from the U.S. Air Force had arrived at St. Cloud Hospital. The 23 team members are there to provide hands-on help, assisting overwhelmed nurses, doctors and other employees who are exhausted physically and emotionally because of the increase in patients, the over-crowding, the ever-increasing work loads.
Like health facilities throughout the nation and the world, St. Cloud Hospital is filled to capacity because of these recurrent surges of the COVID virus and its variants. Sad to say, the biggest cause of the influx of seriously ill patients is due to so many people who refuse to get vaccinated. They have chosen to get terribly sick or even die because of “hoax” theories, jeopardizing not only themselves but others. Many of those people actually believe their antagonism to vaccinations and other health-protection measures is a patriotic duty, a way of proving how “free” they are.
What’s worse is throughout the nation some of them have insulted, threatened and in some cases even physically assaulted nurses, doctors, flight attendants, school-board members, legislators or anyone else who dares to request and/or to mandate they wear a mask or get vaccinated. In at least one case, a woman clerk told a man he must wear a mask to be in the store. He walked away, then came back and shot her to death.
Meantime, life (rational life) somehow manages to go on. Some weeks ago, the much-maligned but honorable Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz asked the federal government for emergency hospital staffing. The U.S. Department of Defense granted the request and sent Air Force teams to Hennepin County Medical Center and St. Cloud Hospital.
Like the cavalry in the movies, they arrived just in time, in the heat of the crisis. There is an 18 percent COVID-positivity rate in the St. Cloud area; at St. Cloud Hospital, 77 percent of patients in the intensive-care unit are there because of COVID infections and almost all of them were unvaccinated; during the virus surge of recent weeks, available intensive-care-unit beds at the hospital hover at or below 5 percent. Those dire factors are exacerbated by the influx of extremely ill COVID patients sent to the St. Cloud Hospital from other rural hospitals that are filled to capacity or unable to handle the severity of the illnesses.
Because of the ongoing pandemic, hospitals have had to cancel or postpone some surgical procedures. They have also had to improvise and make-do, converting spaces to add more beds, to accommodate more and more patients.
In the meantime, hospital staff who have made heroic efforts to help patients for the past two years continue their struggle against burn-out. They are feeling overwhelmed as they endure exhausting work hours, but they forge on because they are so dedicated to helping save lives.
The 23 members of the Air Force Medical Response Team will help out in the intensive-care unit, the emergency room, the surgical department and other areas of the hospital. The team arrived in St. Cloud Nov. 26 and will stay for 30 days, although that time could be extended another two months.
And there’s more good news. The St. Cloud Technical & Community College is now giving nursing-assistant training to 13 members of the Minnesota National Guard. Once trained, they will help nursing staffs at health-care centers and long-term care facilities.
We would like to extend our thanks and undying gratitude to the staff of St. Cloud Hospital, the Air Force team, the technical college and the Guard members. They all arrived in the nick of time to help save the day.
