‘It was a bit scary for all of us at the start’: A doctor shares what it’s like working at Boston Hope Medical Center

Coronavirus is affecting everyday life — even for those who have not been infected. We are sharing stories of its impact on local people. To share your own, please submit this form or email us at [email protected]. This story was told by Kevin Fitzpatrick, a doctor working at Boston Hope, a new field hospital located inside the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, and has been transcribed and edited from a conversation with Kristi Palma.

I’m Kevin Fitzpatrick, the chair of OBGYN for Atrius Health. Clinically, I work out of Mount Auburn Hospital as an OB hospitalist. The last few weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind for us, like for everybody else. I was asked to be a liaison between Atrius, which is a large multi-specialty group across eastern Massachusetts, I was asked to be a liaison between the hospitals and our practice with the impending crisis that we’re now in the middle of. So we put a team together that reached out to the various hospitals in the area to see if they needed help when the surge was happening.

We were contacted about the Boston Hope operation that was being established at the time. Various organizations, Atrius partners, the governor’s office, the mayor’s office, the US military, all kind of got together around Boston Hope to really set up a sub-acute hospital for a lot of patients that would be going through the arc of their care — would be going from home into the hospital, sometimes in the ICU setting, and then would be on their way out again into trying to get rehabilitated and back to home and back to their families. And this was to set up in an area that was safe for them, that we could send the recovering patients to and get them the rehab services and the quarantine that they needed to get back to their communities again. It sounds pretty straightforward, but it was quite a rush.

We got the call about a week before it opened. We pulled together a team, got them over to the Convention Center, got the training that that was required, walked into the Convention Center, saw all the beds that were set up for the patients and jumped right in. The first patient was admitted on April 10. The team pulled together and we’ve just been increasing in volume and in participation over the last few weeks. What was striking to me was just how many people pulled together to help the patients, to really rally around this cause. Even the doctors and nurse practitioners and PAs that were helping us all came from sometimes different systems, sometimes had different skill sets. I’m an OBGYN, so this is not what I do every day. We’ve had orthopedic surgeons, family medicine docs, internists, pediatricians, podiatrists, everybody just pitching in and helping and rallying around the patients. It’s been really an honor to be serving with them and to see how everyone has pulled together with this common cause.

It’s quite a big vacuous space and it was a bit scary for all of us at the start. We didn’t know what we were going to get, we didn’t know what resources we had. We soon found that we had all we needed, plenty of protective gear. The electronic medical records had been set up, the pharmacy started to come online, and it really started to gel. We really began to see, as those patients came in, just what an ordeal they had gone through. A lot of them would have gone to the emergency room once or twice and had been sent back home to recover, and continually got sicker. Most patients would then be admitted to the hospital and sometimes move into intensive care units, sometimes intubated, and then back out the other side into the acute hospital beds and back to us. That was probably upwards of four to five weeks that they were struggling with this disease. You could see it in their faces, they were exhausted, a little disoriented, because they’ve been bouncing between emergency rooms, back home, into the hospitals — which can be disorienting to begin with — and over to us. But it was really nice to see the team again, as our rehab services came online, to get them back out and get them up and moving and get them actually out of the hospital and back to their families as soon as we could. So that was nice to see.

A banner displays “Boston Hope” on April 18 inside the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, which is housing the Boston Hope Medical Center.

With [health care workers] in our full protective gear, it was a little bit of a barrier. Usually, you’re able to shake [a patient’s] hand or touch them. There’s so many barriers to it with with all our protective equipment — which was protecting us — but it really created that sort of human barrier that you just knew in your heart the patients were really craving. They are cut off from their families, people can’t visit them, they’ve gone through a very harrowing experience. It’s just a bit heartbreaking. But it also lets you know that you’re in the right spot. The positive of it being, in that type of a setting, the patients are able to walk around. So there’s a gym facility, there’s a TV area, there’s computers, there’s a small kitchen, because they are not isolated. We are the ones that are isolating ourselves behind all of our equipment.

I’ve done about seven or eight nights there. A typical day for me is, I’ll come down to the Seaport. I’ll usually do a couple nights together. I’ll check into the hotel that has been provided, which has been very nice. And then I’ll head over to the Convention Center at little before 7 o’clock. When you walk in, you get screened. I’ll go to the locker room, change into my scrubs, and then I’ll head into the floor. The way it’s set up is, in the outside perimeter, you’re not in full protective gear. Everyone is masked and everyone’s been screened to get into that space and there’s a lot of hand washing going on, which is great. But then you have to go in through a donning area where you put on your protective gear. So you put on your gown, your gloves, your mask, and your face shield. And then you head into the hospital zone.

We’ll go in and find the team that we’re assigned to for the night. We’ll be told about any patients that might be having trouble or people that we need to keep an eye on. We’ll kind of go through their charts and make sure everything’s okay and, patients that are having trouble, we’ll check in on them and see how they’re doing. That’s another piece that’s a little bit difficult for us. Sometimes you want to go in and chat with them and you can a little bit, but it’s tough when you’re trying to make sure that we’re staying healthy and at a bit of a distance, so you don’t know where the line is sometimes where you’re being nice to the patient and giving them what they need or putting yourself and your team at risk. It’s always a challenge.  And then it is medical care. We care for whatever needs arise over the course of the night. We work with the nurses that are there. Sometimes patients will get sick and we have to send them back to the hospital again. Or sometimes we can evaluate them and get some blood work, or get them some medication and help them out. We just stay there through the night and make sure everything goes okay.

All of us still have our day jobs. I’m still delivering babies. There’s always that balance between your day job and this one. So it’s been quite an experience. I’m proud to be there with my colleagues that stepped up to do this. Hopefully we can close it down soon and and get back to normal. But, you know, we’ll just have to deal with what comes our way.

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