Paris (AFP)

Practitioner in a hospital in the Paris region, on the front line to treat the surge of coronavirus patients, an anesthesiologist-resuscitator delivers daily for AFP, on condition of anonymity, the summary of his day in the middle of a health crisis.

- Sunday March 29 -

Rest today and tomorrow: a little respite ... I am physically tired by all this.

It's hard to say, but it's not easy to get attached to patients right now. They all look alike. And we lose all connection with reality and their daily lives.

Before, some patients were not on respiratory assistance, we could exchange with them. For those who were sedated, we had families who reported their daily lives to us. Relatives brought photos posted in the rooms.

All this does not exist anymore. All the patients are sedated, we succinctly talk to loved ones by phone, essentially for medical news, almost nothing else.

Informing families has become very difficult. They are called at least once a day. But he did not realize. Simply because they do not see what is happening, what is in the bedroom, the body of their sleeping loved one, sometimes very modified.

A resuscitation service is made up of several single rooms, constant background noise: scopes, alarms, noise from respirators ... And then a lot of surveillance elements: screens, pipes, tubes, cables.

Almost all patients are intubated and on respiratory assistance, except those who are better and have been extubated. Patients who have severe lung damage are put on their stomachs, transiently, to try to improve the diffusion of oxygen in certain areas of the lungs, the others are on the back.

With families, we have to be sharper: we tell them that patients are at high risk of dying, whereas in normal times we do not always use these words and some information goes through non-verbal communication. Impossible by phone ...

The pace is strong. Lots of calls, organization to manage. Each patient visit takes a long time: you have to dress to protect yourself before entering each room. This weekend, for the first time we are told about restrictions on masks, surgical or FFP2. You have to look for it right to left. People in the street with masks, often badly worn, annoy me ...

Next week, we don't know what's going to happen. It's a little bit day to day. The wave is likely to continue to rise. We risk seeing a lot of patients and a lot of deaths unfortunately. But the staff are there, quite numerous at the moment, motivated and ready to work as long as it takes. The hardest part is probably not being able to imagine the end of the tunnel yet.

© 2020 AFP