LOS ANGELES, January 5—On New Year’s Eve, I got news that my patient of more than five years had died of complications from Covid-19 two days ago. He called me just three days before he passed and was exhausted with speaking due to shortness of breath. The best I could do at the moment was encourage him to remain calm and stay on his oxygen. He was hospitalized at Martin Luther King Community Hospital which is currently overrun by Covid-19 cases.
I am heartbroken on getting the news of his passing and have mixed emotions on what more I could have done. I called a physician-friend I know who works there to get her take on his situation but to also get a firsthand account on the conditions for healthcare workers and its impact on the quality of patient care.
She looked into his case and informed me that he developed pneumonia with sepsis that led to organ failure. His family had made him “DNR” (Do Not Resuscitate) and after two days removed his life support. She lauded the doctors and nursing staff of their medical and intensive care teams and said that while they are working in terrible conditions, “I have never worked under [worse conditions] in my entire life,” she assured me the quality of care has not yet been impacted in any major ways. She felt confident that while tragic, there was nothing more the MLK medical team could have done for my patient.
What followed, however, was more disturbing.
Death panel protocols
She mentioned MLK hospital was thinking about implementing plans to ration care and that “Death Panel” protocols have been developed. She was furious at the hospital bosses for even considering this of their medical teams when there is currently no county-wide coordination between hospitals and said, “I refused to deny care for my patients while resources in hospitals in Santa Monica or in West LA remain available!” She said, “They’ll get my resignation letter first!”
However, many hospitals in LA County are already reporting their ICU’s effectively full and as of last week the county had one percent of their beds available and the current surge is only expected to worsen in January. Hospitals are now discharging severely ill patients home sooner than they normally would. Ambulance services are being told to restrict the transportation of patients whose hearts have stopped and can only transport to the hospital if they’ve successfully resuscitated the patient out in the field. In other words, patients will be left to die in ambulances or at home (LA Times 1/4/2021). Clearly, the move to fascist “Death Panels” is likely to become a reality.
In addition, the LA Times (1/2) has run a series of articles on MLK Hospital that illustrate how the pre-pandemic day-to-day lives and underlying health conditions of Black and Latin workers are creating “a crisis on top of a crisis….Many residents live in dense, multigenerational housing, work essential jobs and suffer from secondary health conditions due to a lifelong, systemic lack of access to quality primary care.”
Chief Medical Officer John Fisher said:
I describe our healthcare system as separate and unequal and we have a community here that is a reflection of that. We’re all Black and Brown, low income, almost all publicly insured, and really lack the access to healthcare that other communities have. Because of that, we are being hit hard — harder than every other community — by Covid.
My patient was a middle-aged Black man living with HIV and hypertension that was otherwise well controlled. Studies currently suggest that living with HIV and having an otherwise stable immune system poses no greater risk for Covid-19 than non-HIV infected individuals. Having said that, he worked as a Certified Nursing Assistant in a hospital also with rampant Covid-19 cases. His job as an “essential worker” is likely the source of his exposure. In either case, his reality of being a Black worker from Compton in a racist, capitalist system is what killed him.
Sad, angry, but not helpless
While it may be true that it’s the underlying racist conditions that are leading to the high diagnosis and death rates of Covid-19 in Black and Latin communities, MLK Community Hospital is also to blame for being overrun by the virus. When it was rebuilt and opened in 2015, its number of medical beds declined by more than 100 (131 down from 233) and it now lacks the trauma center it once had.
Originally born out of the Watts rebellions of 1965, this current hospital, while staffed by committed healthcare workers putting their lives on the line , is a skeleton of its former self and under-resourced(Politico 11/8/2017).
In the LA Times piece (1/2), one of the ICU doctors said, “For a hospital already struggling under the weight of one healthcare crisis, the patients here are particularly helpless in this battle.”
That’s how my patient and so many other Black, Latin, immigrant and poor working class people are left by a system only concerned with profits. While I am deeply saddened, I am also angry and certainly don’t feel helpless.
Mass work leads the way
I currently work in a mass organization that has been fighting against racist incarceration and organizing healthcare workers, which has been written about in CHALLENGE. We have been building ties with families whose loved ones have been killed by the KKKops, and are getting to know the sister of Nicholas Burgos who was murdered by LA County Sheriffs at Harbor UCLA hospital in October of last year.
I’m talking about my patient and the circumstances surrounding his death with coworkers and friends because only our growth and movement to overthrow capitalism can ever avenge his death and so many others killed by this system.
My patient was deeply loved by family, friends and coworkers. On his social media there are countless messages of shock and sadness. One coworker wrote,
If you work in a hospital you know that your coworkers can quickly turn to family. When you work with people for long 12+ hour shifts dealing with critically ill patients and situations unlike any other work place, a special type of bond is formed. He was just an all-around cool person, one of the most generous, friendly and funny people I've known. He was able to connect with patients, make them feel comfortable, care for them and make them (and me) laugh on a daily basis. He was an amazing caregiver in every sense of the word and risked his life to save others. You're a hero in my book and we'll never forget you.
The bosses took one more of our loved ones and will continue to until we rise up. Healthcare workers need to fight for the lives of our patients, fight for access to vaccinations, refuse their racist “death panels” and join us to build for communist revolution and overthrow this pathological system once and for all!