NPR报刊（每日读报学英语）

原文链接

When Dr. Tiffany M. Osborn received her COVID-19 vaccination shortly after vaccines became available in late 2020, she felt hopeful about the pandemic’s trajectory. A year later, she’s sad and frustrated to see so many COVID patients in the ICU.

Matt Miller / Washington University School of Medicine

The latest surge (激增)in COVID-19 cases is testing the endurance（耐力） of intensive care workers（重症监护人员） at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis.

"You feel like, ‘What am I doing here?’ " says Dr. Nguyet Nguyen, a pulmonary（肺部的） critical care specialist（重症监护专家） at the hospital and assistant professor of medicine（医学助理教授） at Washington University in St. Louis. “I’m working as hard as I can and still all of these people are dying.”

“We’re tired,” says Dr. Tiffany Osborn, a professor of surgery and emergency medicine.（外科和急诊医学的教授） “We see so much needless suffering（不必要的痛苦）.”

Both doctors say un|vaccinated （未接种疫苗的…）people make up the vast majority of(绝大多数的) COVID-19 patients in the ICU. Neither doctor expected to be caring for so many desperately ill patients nearly a year after vaccines became widely available.

两名医生都没有想到，在疫苗广泛使用近一年后，他们会照顾这么多病入绝后的病人。

The toll(死亡人数) on ICU workers has increased steadily, despite advances in both preventing and treating COVID-19.

尽管在预防和治疗COVID-19方面都取得了进展

From fear to fatigue（从恐惧到疲惫）

“In the early days, we were all very scared because we had no idea what this was,” Nguyen says.

“We didn’t know how to prevent it, and we didn’t know how to treat it,” Osborn says, “and there were a lot of concerns that many of us had about, can we bring this home to our family?”

So Osborn moved into an RV（房车） parked in her driveway. She accepted that, but struggled with the burden of watching so many of her patients die.

她接受了这一点，但看着这么多病人死去，她承受着巨大的负担。

Often, the best Osborn could do was make sure a dying patient’s family got to say goodbye — and even that was only over the phone. One of those calls she helped facilitate from the ICU still haunts her.

从重症监护室打来的一个被她帮助的电话至今仍萦绕在她的脑海中。

“As I turned to leave, I hear this voice come over the phone, this small voice that says, ‘I love you, grandpa.’ And all I could do is close the door behind me as I left,” she says. “It’s a very helpless feeling.”

“当我转身要离开时，我听到电话里传来一个声音，一个很小的声音说，‘我爱你，爷爷。’”我所能做的就是在离开时关上身后的门，”她说。“这是一种非常无助的感觉。”

When vaccines began to arrive in late 2020, though, Osborn saw reason for hope.

“When you got that vaccine it was like you could feel the pressure coming off of your shoulders,” she says.

感觉肩膀上的压力减轻了

Health care workers could finally protect themselves with something other than masks and gloves PPE. And it looked like widespread vaccination would reduce the flow of critically ill patients from a torrent to a trickle.

而且，广泛的疫苗接种似乎会将危重病人的流动从大量减少到细流。

Fast forward a year, though, and that still hasn’t happened.

“Most of the people who come to the ICU are still unvaccinated, and they did not have to be where they ended up being,” Nguyen says. “So it’s very frustrating for us to deal with that on a day to day basis.”

因此，每天都要处理这些问题，对我们来说非常令人沮丧。”

The fatigue and frustration may be most acute for intensive care nurses and respiratory therapists, who provide most of the hands-on care in the ICU, Nguyen says. In St. Louis, many have retired early or switched jobs.

Nguyen说，对重症监护护士和呼吸治疗师来说，疲劳和沮丧可能是最严重的，他们在重症监护病房提供了大部分的实际护理。在圣路易斯，许多人已经提前退休或换了工作。

Nguyen thinks she understands why.

“We’re used to dealing with death, but not at the level that we saw with COVID,” she says. “And [we saw] people who were so young, and people who — they didn’t have to die.”

ICU teams are still having to place otherwise healthy, young COVID patients on the last-ditch life-support machines known as ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation), Osborn says.

“We have capacity（能力） for about 12 ECMO machines,” she says. “During our last surge, half of them were [being used for] pregnant women.”

And most of those pregnant women were unvaccinated.

Nguyen wishes that people who still haven’t been vaccinated knew more about what happens to COVID patients in an ICU.

“I don’t think that people understand that for a certain unlucky population, COVID is going to kill you,” she says. “And it’s going to kill you a lot faster than you think.”

When COVID patients arrive in the ICU, Nguyen says, she often explains that they need to make decisions about their care right away because within a few hours, many ICU patients are no longer able to speak or think clearly.

她经常解释说，他们需要立即做出治疗决定，因为在几个小时内，许多重症监护室病人就不能清晰地说话或思考了

BRACING FOR OMICRON

For many weary（疲惫的） health care professionals(卫生保健人员), Nguyen says, each new wave of COVID-19 has been like a punch in the face. “We felt like we were over the peak of Delta and then Omicron comes rolling in and just knocks everybody down again.”

a punch in the face :一拳打在脸上

ICU teams are better prepared now than they were at the beginning of the pandemic（大规模的流行病）. They’ve learned what works to keep COVID patients alive, and there are new drugs arriving that promise to reduce the severity of infections.

SHOTS - HEALTH NEWS

The COVID antiviral drugs are here but they’re scarce. Here’s what to know

Even so, the nation needs to focus on prevention rather than counting on treatment, Osborn says.

即便如此，Osborn说，国家需要把重点放在预防上，而不是指望治疗。

“This holiday season is really all about those interactions with the people we care so much about,（与我们关心的人互动）” she says. “You don’t want it to have to be from a hospital bed with me holding up a telephone so you can talk with your family.”