All posts tagged "Criticalcaremedicine"

PEORIA, Ill. -- Tracy Pinkham remembers all of it: The way the onions looked slimy and how she woke the next morning with a dry mouth and blurry vision that got worse as the day went on. Her head falling to her shoulders as her husband drove to a walk-in clinic that diagnosed her with an inner-ear infection and sent her home. The crowded emergency room. The doctor who scoured his medical textbook for answers. The two months on a breathing machine, paralyzed. The nightmares. The decades of muscle weakness that never seemed to get better despite physical therapy. “I used to joke that I died and ......

ATLANTA – Carey Mullis believes she was put on this earth to nurse. But she’s not sure whether she can take the pandemic’s toll in her south Georgia hospital any more. COVID-19 has turned Georgia’s chronic nursing shortage into a crisis, one whose effects may be felt for years to come. As exhausted staff bear the crushing fourth wave that is building here from the delta variant, many COVID-19 nurses with long experience are quitting, moving to calmer jobs or barely hanging on. In a state that already had one of the nation’s lowest ratios of nurses to population, job postings for nurses jumped ......

In Central Texas, an 11-county region home to more than 2 million people, nearly every ICU bed has been filled amid a recent surge in COVID-19 cases. Health officials in Austin on Friday warned residents that there are just 16 staffed intensive care unit beds available, which is the lowest the figure has been since coronavirus first started its spread across the state. The effected area, dubbed “Trauma Region O,” includes Travis County, in which Austin is located, as well as another 10 counties. “We are running out of time and our community must act now,” Austin-Travis County Health Authority ......