HJBR May/Jun 2025

UNDER PRESSURE 14 MAY / JUN 2025 I  HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF BATON ROUGE   parking lot, because that’s where I could find them. And I think that’s the thing, you know, when you see people kind of minimize all of it now, for those of us who had to take care of those sick people, it’s frustrating. They were very ill, and we had all we could handle. Ferguson I remember that the biggest thing that took its toll on us, the critical care side, was that families couldn’t come in and visit their sick family member. And, normally, in an ICU-like situation where someone’s criti- cally ill and battling for their life, the family member is at the bedside seeing the same things that you see. So, they couldn’t see. And so, most of our care throughout the day — when we weren’t trying to put out fires and rescue someone with a ventilator — it was spent on the phone trying to convey the severity of how ill their loved ones were. And some people believed us and took us at face value. Some people didn’t and said that it was a media scam by the Liberal Demo- crats or whatever agenda they thought was out to get them at that time. But that was the hardest part — not being able to have them there to convey the illness. So, at one point we brought in … we took all of our little iPads that we use for the translation service and put FaceTime on them so that we could have people FaceTime and see the things that we were seeing. And that was helpful to a degree, but it still wasn’t the same as someone being at the bedside with their sick loved one. And that was, that was tax- ing. That was hard. Giarrusso As the only woman on this panel, I’ll say, I don’t know that anybody appreci- ates the personal sacrifice that everybody up here made and, you know, all the essen- tial workers in general made with their daily lives. You know, most people, or a lot of peo- ple, were off work and had more time with their kids and were able to help their kids with their homeschooling, which, you know … but for me, working 12 or 14 hours a day for that many days straight, my kids per- fected how to make a grilled cheese. They learned how to make homemade bread. So, there were all these things that my kids just had to do. I would get on FaceTime and tell themhow to do whatever they needed to do. My husband and I are both in medicine, so we were both gone and they raised them- selves for several months. They did a pretty good job. Allen And I just remember, it was like this little ritual when I would get home of, I would get some clean scrubs in the garage — literally, the scrubs would come off in the garage, you know — and, like Cody said, straight inside, away from all family, shower, the whole bit, fresh … you know what I mean? Tried to isolate a little home isolation unit. Ferguson Yeah, like just like these guys, I stripped naked in the garage, walked inside with my ball of clothes, dropped it straight into the washing machine, turned it on as hot as it will go with as much soap as I can put in there, and straight to the shower with water. Ford Did you use alcohol? Did you spray with alcohol? Lucky. This guy is lucky. Ferguson Shower as hot as I can take it, and then, my wife and I, we stayed socially dis- tanced in the house. We kept 10 feet from each other, sat on different couches in the living room. Slept in different bedrooms for the first two months. Gremillion Exactly. Sleep in different bed- rooms. And it sounds crazy now, but … Sit- ting away from each other 10 or 15 feet because you’re worried that you may have been exposed. You know, it’s just so interest- ing, the things we did. And you’re just trying to protect your family. Giarrusso Oh, you remember when we couldn’t send anybody home because we were out of home oxygen? Ford Oh no, our people didn’t go home. Giarrusso Yeah, we would send everybody home; and there was a point where we couldn’t send anybody home because we didn’t have any more oxygen tanks to send home.