Patient livid after hospital cancels surgery due to COVID surge: ‘I cried so hard that I had a headache’

The surge in unvaccinated coronavirus patients filling hospital beds has created a heartbreaking situation for a columnist in Tennessee who had her surgery canceled — even though it is necessary to ensure she "stayed breathing."

Betsy Phillips of the Nashville Scenerevealed on Tuesday that her scheduled surgery on Friday has been cancelled.

She found out last Friday her surgery is being cancelled because the hospital is too full of COVID-19 patients.

"Until Friday, I can't remember the last time I cried so hard that I had a headache after," she explained.

In a previous column, Phillips had worried about the surgery being canceled.

"I've got 'right up against your windpipe,' 'move your lung out of the way' and 'you'll be among the last surgeries to be canceled because of a COVID influx, due to your situation.' That's what's sticking in my head about things. My life is in a minor amount of peril (as long as things stay how they are), so the health care providers will do everything they can to keep my surgery date as scheduled — but I could get bumped if the hospital is full of COVID patients," she explained.

In Tuesday's column, she wrote she got vaccinated the week she was eligible and did "everything asked of me for the past 18 months."

"I did my part to get COVID over with as quickly as possible. And all these people who did not do their part are clogging up the hospitals," she explained.

She described the unvaccinated as "selfish assh*les."

"F*ck them. I'm so pissed. They're too sick to do it, but unvaccinated COVID patients should have to be the ones to call people like me and tell us we can't have the surgeries we were counting on because of them. I cried and cussed when the scheduler called me, but then I apologized, because it's not her fault. And, my God, can you imagine the trauma of having to call multiple people and hearing them all in despair? But if I had been talking to an unvaccinated person who is in a hospital bed that I need? Well, let me just say that I would have found it cathartic," she wrote.

She described feeling "utter contempt" while watch of video of Bill Lee, the state's GOP governor, dodging doctors at a press conference.

"At this point, refusing to get vaccinated when you can looks, from the outside, like a kind of self-harm that quickly spreads to harming others. Refusing to wear a mask makes you look selfish and myopic. Keeping masks off your kids looks like you're trying to get your kids and other people's kids sick," she wrote.

Phillips says she will never forget the unvaccinated who have harmed her.

"The unvaccinated in this state have told me that they will harm others to get their way. I have evidence, based on my own experience, that this is true. I have been harmed now by people refusing to get vaccinated," she wrote. "I will be very wary of them for the rest of my days. Maybe they don't see it as wishing me harm, but they have harmed me, and I would be a fool to give them the benefit of the doubt that they didn't mean it."