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Chris Comfort says that at the start of the pandemic, Lawrence and Memorial Hospital in New London didn’t see a lot of COVID-19 patients. But he and other nurses on the medical-surgical unit kept their eyes on the scene unfolding at Greenwich Hospital at the other end of the state.
“They got hit very hard because they’re at the border of New York,” he said. “Basically, their whole entire hospital was COVID except for a very small designated non-COVID unit.”
He volunteered to go to help.
“It was definitely an eye-opening experience,” he said. “Patients that really should be in ICU are in regular medical beds because there’s just not enough critical care beds. You know, people were on immense amounts of oxygen. I mean, I’ve been a nurse for 19 years, and I’ve never seen people requiring this much oxygen ever in my entire life.”