A look inside a modern COVID-19 ‘field hospital’

CRANSTON, RI (AP) – Nicholas DiPompo finally went home.

The 78-year-old former real estate manager, who had battled COVID-19 for weeks at a field hospital in Rhode Island, grabbed his stick and screamed down the hall.

“You have my number,” DiPompo called out to fellow patient Art Singleton, with whom he had grown close after three weeks. “Call me when you get out.” He said they would go to his favorite restaurant for fried stuffed lobster.

Singleton, 56, sat in his wheelchair and watched a nurse push his friend down the makeshift hallway. Another nurse pulled DiPompo’s oxygen tank behind her, past a long row of blue curtains, each with a bed.

“We were at the bottom,” DiPompo said of his friendship with Singleton, a pizzeria worker who had lost part of a leg to diabetes. “He had no feet, I had a heart condition.”

Then DiPompo left, driving out of a field hospital built in an old Citizens Bank call center, into a two-story office building on a busy shopping street. The nonprofit Care New England opened Kent Field Hospital on Nov. 30, just before Rhode Island’s infection rate became the highest in the world. Kent Hospital used all of its beds for the sickest COVID-19 patients and needed a place for the landing. Now other hospitals also occasionally send patients to the field hospital.

Rhode Island’s infection rate has since declined, and many of the field hospital’s 335 beds are now empty. On quiet days, the medical staff wish they could do more.

Only stable, non-intubated COVID-19 patients are transferred a few kilometers to the field hospital, and only if they agree. Some refuse. The idea of ​​a field hospital can conjure up images of gigantic tents in a war zone, canvas flapping in the wind.

This is nothing like that. A $ 6 million renovation turned the office building into a modern hospital for less ill COVID patients, with negative-pressure air ducts winding along the ceilings and removing airborne contaminants.

About 200 patients went through the field hospital, most of whom spent just a few days before going home to recover. Unlike in a regular hospital ward, where COVID patients cannot leave their room, patients can walk around freely here.

At low patient numbers, the medical staff pay close attention to each person: they help walk the corridors to improve lung capacity, stretch stiff feet, hand out ice creams, coloring pictures with an elderly man, cutting Singleton’s hair.

Family members hand in fresh clothes and food, and even deliver enough pizza for all staff and patients once. Table clocks, the kind that were once ubiquitous at hotel counters, sit next to every bed to call nurses.

Then there’s what the staff call “ the bridal suite, ” the curtain-screened cubicle where Peter and Pauline Sorrow – finally, hopefully – end their battle with the coronavirus.

Peter, 62, and Pauline, 71, have been together for 25 years. The longest they’ve been apart was the five days Peter was first hospitalized for COVID-19 in January. Since then, due to recovery and relapse, he has been to the main hospital twice and is now on his second stint in the field hospital. After Pauline first fell ill, they sat across the hall in the main hospital for a few days, isolated in their own negative room, talking on the phone.

Pauline, who is still largely bedridden, was thrilled when they wheeled her bed next to Peter in the field hospital.

He now helps take care of her: opening a stubborn lid on her lunch, cleaning a place to eat from her frock, updating their family.

“He saved me,” she said. While both are steadily recovering, Pauline is concerned that COVID-19 could still take them both.

“I sometimes wonder if we wake up and we’re gone,” she said.

In many ways, the quieter pace of the field unit is a welcome relief for the medical staff. Subrina Geer, 33, a nurse here on temporary assignment, saw the disease plague New York City last year.

This is different: “It was a relief to see how many patients we could discharge,” she said.

Dr. Paari Gopalakrishnan, who runs the field hospital, thought they would now be ready to shut it down. But with the main hospital still full of patients – many with severe COVID-19 – it’s too early to make that decision.

“Basically what we did is kick the tin on the road,” he said. The field hospital is “easy to shut down, but very difficult to turn it back on.”