CRANSTON, RI – Nicholas DiPompo was finally going home.
Grabbing his cane, the 78-year-old former property manager, who spent weeks battling COVID-19 at a Rhode Island field hospital, settled into a wheelchair and shouted down the hall.
“You have my number,” shouted DiPompo to fellow patient Art Singleton, whom he had approached after three weeks together. “Call me when you leave.” He said they would go to his favorite restaurant to eat baked stuffed lobster.
Singleton, 56, sat in his wheelchair and watched a nurse push his friend down the makeshift corridor. Another nurse pulled DiPompo’s oxygen tank behind him, past a long row of blue curtains, a bed behind each one.
“We were at rock bottom,” said DiPompo of his friendship with Singleton, a pizzeria employee who lost part of his leg due to diabetes. “He had no feet, I had heart disease.”
Then DiPompo left a field hospital built in an old Citizens Bank call center, in a two-story office building on a busy shopping street. The non-profit healthcare network Care New England opened Kent Field Hospital on November 30, just before Rhode Island’s infection rate became the highest in the world. Kent Hospital was using all beds for its sickest patients with COVID-19 and needed a place for the overflow. Now, other hospitals also occasionally send patients to the field hospital.
Rhode Island’s infection rate has since declined and many of the 335 beds in the field hospital are empty. On calm days, the medical team wants to be able to do more.
Only patients with stable and un intubated COVID-19 are transferred a few kilometers to the field hospital, and only if they consent. Some refuse. The idea of a field hospital can evoke images of giant tents in a war zone, the sides of the tarpaulin swaying in the wind.
This is nothing like that. A $ 6 million renovation has transformed the office building into a modern hospital for less-sick COVID patients, with negative pressure air ducts that meander along the ceiling, extracting airborne contagions.
Approximately 200 patients passed through the field hospital, most spending just a few days before returning home to finish their recovery. Unlike a normal hospital ward, where COVID patients cannot leave their rooms, patients here are free to roam.
With a low number of patients, the medical team pays a lot of attention to each person: helping them to walk down the aisles to improve their lung capacity, stretching their stiff feet, handing out popsicles, coloring pictures with an elderly man, cutting Singleton’s hair.
Relatives leave clean clothes and food, even bringing enough pizza once for all employees and patients. Table bells, the type once ubiquitous on hotel desks, sit beside each bed to call the nurses.
Then there is what the team calls the “honeymoon suite”, the curtain-less cubicle where Peter and Pauline Sorrow are – finally, lucky – ending their battles against the coronavirus.
Peter, 62, and Pauline, 71, have been together for 25 years. The longest time they were apart was the five days that Peter was first hospitalized in January for COVID-19. Since then, during his recovery and relapse, he has been to the main hospital twice and is now finishing his second season at the field hospital. For a few days, after Pauline fell ill, they were across the hall from the main hospital, isolated in their own negative pressure rooms, communicating by phone.
Pauline, who is still mostly bedridden, was thrilled when they placed her roll-away bed next to Peter’s in the field hospital.
He now helps to take care of her: opening a stubborn lid on her lunch, cleaning a piece of food from her dress, updating her family.
“He saved me,” she said. While both are constantly recovering, Pauline fears that COVID-19 may still take them both.
“I kind of wonder sometimes if we’re going to wake up and not be here,” she said.
In many ways, the quieter pace of the field unit is a welcome relief for medical staff. Subrina Geer, 33, a nurse here on a temporary assignment, saw the disease devastate New York City last year.
This is different: “It was a breath of fresh air to see how many patients we could discharge,” she said.
Dr. Paari Gopalakrishnan, who runs the field hospital, thought that they would now be ready to close it. But with the main hospital still crowded with patients – many with severe COVID-19 – it’s too early for that decision.
“What we basically did was kick the can down the road,” he said. The field hospital is “easy to disconnect, but very difficult to rewire”.
