A look at a modern COVID-19 ‘field hospital’

CRANSTON, RI (AP) – Nicholas DiPompo finally goes home.

The 78-year-old former property manager, who struggled with COVID-19 in a Rhode Island field hospital for weeks, clutched his reed and fell into a wheelchair and rolled across the hallway.

“You have my number,” DiPompo shouted at fellow patient Art Singleton, whom he was close to after three weeks together. “Call me when you get out.” He said they go to his favorite restaurant for baked stuffed lobster.

Singleton, 56, sits in his wheelchair and watches as a nurse pushes his friend down the hall. Another nurse pulls DiPompo’s oxygen tank behind him, past a long row of blue curtains, a bed behind each.

“We were at the bottom,” DiPompo said 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, driven from a field hospital building in an old Citizens Bank call center, leaves for a two-story office building in a busy shopping street. The non-profit Care New England health network opened Kent Field Hospital on November 30, just before Rhode Island’s infection rate became the highest in the world. Kent Hospital used all its beds for its sickest COVID-19 patients and had to overflow somewhere. Now other hospitals are also sending patients to the field hospital.

Rhode Island’s infection rate has declined since then, and many of the 335 beds in the field hospital are now empty. On quiet days, the medical staff wishes they could do more.

Only stable, non-intubated patients with COVID-19 are transferred to the field hospital several kilometers, and only if they consent. Some refuse. The idea of ​​a field hospital could turn up images of giant tents in a war zone, and canvases fluttering sides in the wind.

It’s nothing like that. A $ 6 million renovation has transformed the office building into a modern hospital for less ill COVID patients, with air pressure ducts under negative pressure snaking along the ceilings, indicating air pollution.

About 200 patients were through the field hospital, and most spent just a few days before going home to recover. Unlike in a regular hospital ward, where COVID patients cannot leave their rooms, patients can walk around here.

With low patient numbers, the medical staff pays attention to every person: they help walk through the hallways to improve lung capacity, stick out stiff feet, hand out ice cubes, color in photos with an older man, Singleton’s hair cut.

Family members drop off fresh clothes and food, and even bring enough pizza once for all the staff and patients. Table tone bells, the kind that once appear in front of the hotel benches, sit next to each bed to call nurses.

Then there’s what the staff call ‘the honeymoon suite’, the curtain cage where Peter and Pauline Sorrow are – finally hopefully – to end their battles with the coronavirus.

Peter (62) and Pauline (71) have been together for 25 years. The longest they were apart was the five days when Peter was first admitted to the hospital in January for COVID-19. Since then, through recovery and relapse, he has been in the main hospital twice and is now in his second period in the field hospital. For a few days after Pauline first became ill, they were just across the hall from the main hospital, isolated in their own suppression rooms and communicated by telephone.

Pauline, who is still mostly bedridden, was delighted when they drove past Peter’s in the field hospital next to her bed.

He now helps to take care of her: to open a stubborn lid on her lunch, to clean a eatery of her gown, to update their family.

“He saved me,” she said. While both are recovering, Pauline is worried that COVID-19 could take both.

“I sometimes wonder if we’re going to wake up and we won’t be here,” she said.

In many ways, the quieter pace of the field unit is a welcome relief to medical staff. Subrina Geer, 33, a nurse here on a temporary assignment, saw the disease in New York last year.

It’s different: ‘It was fresh air to see how many patients we could discharge,’ she said.

Dr. Paari Gopalakrishnan, who runs the field hospital, thought they would now be ready to close it. But with the main hospital still full of patients – many with severe COVID-19 – it’s too early for the decision.

“What we basically did was kick the can down the road,” he said. The field hospital is “easy to turn off, but very difficult to turn it back on.”