I am so sorry to hear about your wife. But I am not sure what you could have done. It sounds like you were too sick yourself at the time to have put up a fight against the hospital staff even if you had more knowledge about Remdesiver and intubation earlier. Seriously, even if you had read some articles and taken notes on them for weeks when you were well, would your brain have been working well enough to use them? I don’t think so. And the doctors and nurses would have heard the breathlessness from your own Covid in your voice and ignored you because they would think you were delusional.
We are all at the mercy of our networks and lack of them and more so back months ago. Now it might not be as bad for people in the hospital with Covid. The delusion may be breaking. But back then, if you didn’t have three people close to you, in spirit, knowledge and proximity, on things Covid, who you could call on when you get hit with it at the same time a household member is hit, you were in for a tough go.
In January 2010, my mother went into the hospital with pneumonia. I suspect it was from the flu going around then that they wouldn’t admit was as bad as it was because the powers that be needed a 2nd Obama administration to set them up for much of what we experienced the last few years.
My father says that on the day they put her on the vent, she was acting fine enough, was watching QVC and seemed happy. They came in the room all upset because her pulse ox numbers were down per their monitor and insisted they had to intubate her.
My father figured they knew what they were doing.
I have no idea what that was all about. I wasn’t there.
I wonder now if there wasn’t some protocol in place then.
My mother never was able to have intubation removed. They declared her brain dead. We removed life support about after that day.
My father was racked with guilt and depression.
It’s tough not knowing if there was incompetence on the part of the hospital, some secret protocol or info them came from the CDC or wherever that instructed them to ventilate as soon as a monitor showed a certain reading, or if my mother was worse than what they were telling my father. I would have been up there sooner, but I was lead to believe she was holding her own. They were going to transfer her closer to Columbus that day in order to address that condition and other ones.
In your case, you have a pretty good idea that it was the protocol that caused your wife’s death. The same over all protocol is what caused you to become too sick to care for her. Imagine how different things would have been if her cancer doctor and your own doctor had instructed you to call them as soon as you thought either of the two of you had Covid so you could both get HCQ— the one who had Covid and the other who needed to be kept from getting it if they didn’t already have it so they could care for the other.
It’s not you. It’s them.
A very great number of people have perfusion issues which can render those miracle pulse oximeters worthless. Even if their fingers are simply cold the numbers can be skewed greatly. Using a pulse ox reading to justify an intubation is in my opinion a mortal sin. A blood gas is absolutely an imperative, and the Oxygen level is not the most important value. The Ph and CO2 are what is needed to determine ‘respiratory failure.’ Recall Ventilation is the NUMBER ONE LIFE FUNCTION. Low Oxygenation levels are normally quickly contended with in most cases without intubation.
I have personally witnessed Doctors intubating patients without ever having obtained an ABG. This is for me difficult to accept. A low O2 level does not always itself justify intubation. People do not appreciate that which is understandable but ought to be explained. A pulse oximeter is cool and flashy, but really has no place in determining a need for intubation. An ET CO2 (measured exhaled CO2) provides much more valuable data.