Paris (AFP)

Practitioner in a hospital in the Paris region, on the front line since February to treat patients with severe forms of Covid-19, an anesthesiologist delivers his journal of the crisis every week for AFP, on condition of anonymity sanitary.

"For now, the Covid resuscitation patients for the month of October frankly resemble the Covid patients for the month of March. The days are again punctuated by the prone position (a position that facilitates the passage of air, note) of some patients, the careful settings of the ventilator, new data to families mainly by phone and sometimes, unfortunately deaths.

We also found the FFP2 masks and their peculiar medicine cabinet smell that we tried to forget this summer.

Again, we draw paramedics where we can.

Nursing anesthetists, operating room nurses, all nurses likely to have the knowledge and skills to take care of intensive care patients are called upon.

And we try to move the boat forward with the means at hand.

At the moment, there is little flow of patients.

An entry into intensive care every day overall and a few calls to conventional care units to assess the need for an intensive care place for this or that patient.

Few calls from outside.

We opened ten additional beds last week.

We are asked to prepare for more.

All of this is gradually increasing.

But we do not see very clearly our room for maneuver.

We are told to increase to around 20 beds next week.

It would be a miracle ...

Unlike last spring, when each Covid unit was barred with a plastic sheet installed and hastily taped to separate the Covid sectors from the non-Covid sectors, our hospital and our various resuscitation services have this time little. exchange.

No more plastic sheeting.

No more dressing rooms at the entrance to the units.

The Covid has become more democratized.

Our isolation protocols have relaxed somewhat.

Only patient rooms are now subject to the drastic dressing / undressing protocol.

For now people are holding out, despite a certain weariness.

We try to resist and maintain the rest of our medical, teaching and research activities as much as we can.

It's important for morale.

And for our patients.

The prospect of maintaining the right to a few days off here and there for those who wish it leaves us the hope of being able to breathe a little.

But the announcement of the curfew gave a chill.

As with everyone, probably.

This nocturnal confinement crystallizes the fact that we have entered the second or second wave.

We continue to stick together, sometimes use a little humor or irony and go together to eat in the daycare, with a few and at a very safe distance, just to keep a semblance normal life in the hospital ".

© 2020 AFP