How a Nurse Cared for her #COVID19 Physician Husband at Home #Coronavirus

The caregiver below had a milder case of COVID-19

The Federalist on April 19, 2020, published a story on home care of the COVID-19 patient. The narrator is a retired community health nurse and the patient is her husband of 49 years, an oncologist.

I’ve mentioned “proning” before:

The key reason people go to the hospital with COVID is difficulty in breathing. When my husband started to feel his breathing become more strained, he asked his doctor to order an oxygen tank that he could use at home. Many people may not realize that home oxygen is even a possibility, but it is prescribed for many conditions and there are companies that provide oxygen with systems meant to be used by non-medical professionals, delivered through simple tubes into the nose.

Along with the oxygen, we got an oximeter to measure oxygen saturation in the blood. It’s the little device they often clip onto your finger in a hospital. They’re available at some pharmacies, and we later learned that the oxygen company had a few as well. Having the ability to monitor oxygen levels at home was key to being able to gauge whether it was still safe to be at home and whether things were getting better or worse.

Another simple technique that is now being employed widely in hospitals, is that of sleeping prone, on one’s abdomen. Many hospitals are trying to keep COVID patients face-down for 16 hours a day, with them sitting up the other eight. That maximizes the lungs’ ability to work effectively, which is hard on one’s back. For my husband it was particularly uncomfortable because of a previous neck surgery, but by monitoring his oxygen saturation we could see how helpful it was.

When his oxygen was at 92 percent on his back, it jumped to 97 percent on his abdomen. We would have had to double his supplemental oxygen to get that kind of improvement. When he didn’t want to stay in that position, I used several strategies to keep him there.

I recommend the entire article to you even though I’m not on board (yet?) with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin and steroids. Nearly all experts I’ve read recommend against the steroids. The steroids may have been given early-on in the epidemic when we really had no idea.

A pulse oximetry device like this was helpful in the case at hand

Steve Parker, M.D.

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