‘So many deaths’: Uniontown Hospital on frontline of COVID battle
A woman comforts her husband of 55 years in Uniontown Hospital's intensive care unit.
Patients in Uniontown Hospital's intensive care unit are hooked to a tangle of tubes. COVID-19 makes breathing difficult without the assistance of a ventilator pushing air into the lungs.
Nurses on Uniontown Hospital's COVID-19 unit enjoy a moment of respite between pulling on and shrugging out of PPE and administering medications to patients. Moments like this are rare and cherished by the exhausted health-care workers.
Rose Mommsen began her nursing career at Uniontown Hospital late last year. She said the physically and emotionally taxing job of working through the pandemic is all she's known as a health-care worker.
U.S. Air Force veteran Paul Lagojda inhales a breathing treatment on 1 West at Uniontown Hospital. Lagojda – who was vaccinated and boosted – was surprised when he tested positive and was admitted to the COVID wing in January.
A health-care worker at Uniontown Hospital changes into personal protective equipment as she hurries down the long hallway of 1 West, the hospital's COVID unit, to answer a patient's call.
A doctor and nurse work together to administer medications to a COVID-19 patient in Uniontown Hospital's intensive care unit. Patients are hooked to a tangle of tubes and breathe with the assistance of ventilators.
Paul Lagojda sits up in his hospital bed as his nurse, Alivia Rolaf, explains how to use the orange inhaler she unwrapped and placed in his hands.
“Breathe in and push the button,” Rolaf said, guiding the inhaler to his lips.
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Paul Lagojda inhales a breathing treatment on 1 West at Uniontown Hospital. During a follow-up appointment for a prostate issue, Lagojda tested positive and was admitted to the COVID wing.
“How many times?” Lagojda asked.
“Just one. There you go. Good job!” Rolaf said encouragingly.
Lagojda, an 83-year-old U.S. Air Force veteran who lives in Carmichaels, originally came to WVU Medicine Uniontown Hospital for a follow-up for a prostate issue. He tested positive for COVID-19 and was admitted.
It’s Lagojda’s first day on 1 West, one of the hospital’s COVID wings; his nurses and cable news are keeping him company. He picks at breakfast, which he declared to be very good, but he has no appetite.
“I was surprised but not shocked that I got COVID,” said Lagojda, who is fully vaccinated.
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Paul Lagojda was vaccinated and boosted against COVID-19, but the 83-year-old Air Force veteran tested positive at a follow-up appointment for an unrelated medical issue and was admitted to Uniontown Hospital’s COVID wing, 1 West. Lagojda said he was surprised he contracted COVID.
His symptoms were less severe than they would have been if he hadn’t gotten his vaccines, his nurses said.
All 14 beds in this COVID unit are occupied, and when a woman is discharged from Room 12 at 11:30 a.m., another COVID patient is wheeled into the negative-pressure room about an hour-and-a-half later.
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Ninety minutes after a patient was discharged from a room on 1 West, another COVID-19 patient was wheeled in for treatment. The rooms on 1 West at Uniontown Hospital are negative-pressure to facilitate easier breathing.
The wing is supposed to house less seriously sick COVID patients, but it also contains critically ill patients waiting for a bed in the ICU.
Upstairs, in the ICU, all 15 beds are occupied by COVID patients, all of whom are on ventilators. Multiple monitors keep track of vital organs, beeping and humming outside of the rooms’ big glass doors.
It’s lunchtime, but the patients are fed continuously through tubes.
In Room 1, a coronavirus patient in his 50s is clinging to life, but he isn’t expected to survive. Earlier in the week, three COVID patients died in that room within a 24-hour period.
“Most of the patients here are close to passing, and we have a lot of younger patients in their 50s and 60s,” said Jarrod McMaster, director of the ICU. “We are seeing a lot of younger, relatively healthy patients.”
Almost all of the patients were unvaccinated, McMaster said.
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COVID-19 patients rely on ventilators to breathe. All but one of the 15 rooms in Uniontown Hospital’s intensive care unit were occupied by COVID patients in late January.
ICU nurse Mary Halbrook vividly remembers treating one of the hospital’s first COVID patients, and she hasn’t stopped since. For nearly two years, she and her co-workers have comforted frightened patients gasping to breathe. They’ve helped turn patients from their backs onto their stomachs to help oxygen get to their lungs. They’ve taken people off life-support. They’ve held the hands of patients so they didn’t die alone and arranged video calls for families to see their loved ones before they passed away.
“It’s been a never-ending cycle, and it’s so sad watching these people who are just ready to die,” said Halbrook, who has been a nurse for 32 years.
During most of her years in the ICU, three or four ventilators were in use at one time, Halbrook said.
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Patients in Uniontown Hospital’s intensive care unit are hooked to a tangle of tubes. COVID-19 makes breathing difficult without the assistance of a ventilator pushing air into the lungs.
“We’ve never run 15 vents up here like we have been. We’ve run 15 vents every day, and as soon as one patient leaves, another one comes in who had coded, or they’re sick enough that they now need the vent. Before COVID, it was never like that.”
ICU nurse Jennifer McQueen has been a registered nurse for about 3 1/2 years, so she has spent more than half of her nursing career risking her own life on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“This has just been constant. There was a period where it calmed down, but ever since the fall, it’s just been so busy – patient after patient. It seems we move one out, and we get one in,” said McQueen. “I don’t think people realize how bad it is because they don’t see it from in here, how sick people can actually get from COVID. I think that’s the big thing; in our area, people don’t think it can make you as sick as it does until it happens to their loved one. And then people are kind of in disbelief that they’re this sick.”
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A health-care worker at Uniontown Hospital changes into personal protective equipment as she hurries down the long hallway of 1 West, the hospital’s COVID unit, to answer a patient’s call.
In Fayette County, only 60.4% of its 129,274 residents are vaccinated, ranking 35th among Pennsylvania’s 67 counties.
Two years ago, before 1 West was converted into a COVID unit, it was an orthopedics unit.
“We had a lot of orthopedic surgeries – knee surgeries, hip surgeries – and that is what I was basically trained in,” said nurse Terry Grimm.
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Health-care workers make their way down 1 West in Uniontown Hospital while nurse Rose Mommsen files paperwork outside a COVID patient’s room at a rolling nurse’s station.
Now, most of Grimm’s days and nights are spent making sure his COVID patients can get enough oxygen. He monitors Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) and Bi-Level Positive Airway Pressure (BiPAP) machines that push a steady air stream to the lungs. He also adjusts oxygen levels, administers inhalers and intravenous steroids and gives Remdesivir, an antiviral medication used to treat COVID.
“Some people are on antibiotics because sometimes the viral pneumonia ends up turning into bacterial pneumonia, and they end up with a high white blood cell count,” said Grimm. “Mostly, it’s treating the symptoms of (COVID). It’s a virus; you have to just let it play out.”
On this Wednesday, the Emergency Department is jam-packed. All of WVU Medicine Uniontown’s 120 beds are filled – 50 of those beds are occupied by COVID patients – and patients who need to be admitted are being held in the emergency room, something the hospital has often done throughout the pandemic.
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The nurse’s station along 1 West, Uniontown Hospital’s COVID wing, is stocked with medical essentials, including medications and cotton balls.
Since Christmas and New Year’s, the ED has seen the usual emergency room issues – heart attacks, broken arms, car accidents – but it’s also been swamped with people arriving with omicron, the highly transmissible COVID variant.
Omicron is widely believed to cause milder, though not mild, symptoms and shorter hospitalizations than delta, and vaccines and boosters are continuing to provide significant protection against serious illness.
But because omicron is likely to infect far more people, it has led to a significant spike in the overall number of hospitalizations.
This has led to the backups in emergency departments across the country. People are waiting several hours to be seen because emergency room beds are filled with patients waiting to be admitted to the hospital.
Nurses and staff in hospitals nationwide have been verbally berated and, increasingly, hit or punched by patients angry with the long waits.
Uniontown Hospital officials believe they are near the peak of this surge, the fourth since the pandemic started, and they are hoping hospitalizations fall over the next two weeks or so.
“We still are knee-deep in this, but I think we’re reaching the peak,” said Dr. David Hess, CEO and Chief Medical Officer for WVU Medicine Uniontown. “This surge has lasted longer than we expected.”
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A doctor in the intensive care unit of Uniontown Hospital assesses a COVID-19 patient before directing a nurse to administer more medications.
Staff, too, are struggling with the amount of death they’ve seen.
Rolaf graduated from Penn State Fayette’s nursing school in May 2021. She always wanted to be a nurse, ever since she saw the care nurses gave her brother, who died in an ICU when she was younger.
She started at WVU Medicine Uniontown’s ICU but moved to 1 West.
“There were so many deaths. It was a lot to handle. That’s why I left. I couldn’t do that anymore,” said Rolaf. “I knew nursing was going to be hard, but COVID adds a lot to it.”
Like hospitals across the country, WVU Medicine Uniontown is experiencing staff shortages – the result of nurses and staff getting sick from COVID or quarantining, and nurses quitting or retiring due to burnout, or leaving for travel nurse positions, which pay as much as $5,000 a week.
Grimm picks up extra shifts – he now works four or five 12-hour shifts a week – and nurses sometimes put in 16-hour days, staying an additional four hours to help when staff is shorthanded.
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Nurses on Uniontown Hospital’s 1 West COVID wing discuss a patient’s care at the work station in this file photo from 2022.
He recalled the early days of the pandemic when health-care workers were cheered as “health-care heroes.”
“At first, there were all those people outside who’d come to support us, send us pizzas, but I think people’s enthusiasm has stopped. I don’t know if it’s because they got used to COVID and it’s the new normal now, and I wouldn’t say we’re unappreciated, but I think it’s not paid attention to as closely as it was because people are tired of it, and now it’s just like, whatever,” said Grimm. “But we keep showing up.”
Pennsylvania has deployed nurses to hospitals hard-hit by COVID, especially in response to the omicron variant, but none were sent to Uniontown.
Morale at hospitals across the country is at a low, and despite WVU Medicine Uniontown’s continued efforts to boost spirits, employees feel worn down.
“Sometimes it’s even tough to come to work. You’re just so burned out seeing it all the time, how sick people are from COVID,” said Grimm. “COVID’s so unpredictable. We’ve had 100-year-olds come in with COVID and survive and 20-year-olds who have died. The youngest I’ve had was 21. Now, there are a lot between 40 and 60, a lot of 50- and- 60-year-olds dying.”
Grimm said he tries not to talk about work when he’s home. His sister is a nurse at the hospital, too, so he talks to her about what happens on his shifts.
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After hanging IV bags in a COVID patient’s room, Rose Mommsen recounts how trying the pandemic has been on health-care workers. Here and nationwide, the last 22 months have been filled with gruelingly long shifts and more death than they’ve ever seen.
“I try to leave work at work. I try not to think about it. If I’m off for three or five days, I focus on what I have to do at home, spend time with my family and friends,” he said.
Halbrook said “the never-ending cycle” has exhausted her and her co-workers.
“We’re beyond burnout. You see nurses who have been here one or two years, and they’re ready to leave. It’s so different than when I started nursing. People who just started, that’s all they’ve seen, the high-end stress of COVID. But when you’re out in public, it looks like people think COVID is over with,” said Halbrook. “My sister-in-law’s father passed away on Christmas Day from COVID. It’s hitting everywhere. It’s not over.”
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Stations along 1 West are stocked with PPE, including gloves, hair nets and robes that health-care workers must put on before entering a COVID patient’s room.
In 1 West, Tiffney Lovett, who has been a Certified Nurse Assistant for 15 years, said, “This is the most stressful it’s ever been in the nursing field.”
She works through lunch, instead grabbing Pepsi and pickles when she finds a free minute.
She tries her best to lighten the load of Grimm, Rolaf, and the other nurses, hurrying from room to room to respond to alarms, bathe patients, help turn them, tell them corny jokes to make them laugh.
“There have been a lot of employees who quit. It’s bad. I don’t want to do anything else, though,” said Lovett. “I go home, and I cry for a couple of minutes, and then I come back the next day and do it all over again.”
She’s had countless low moments.
One low point occurred with a man who came in on Christmas Eve with COVID. Initially, the man, who was fond of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, responded well to treatment.
“Then he took a turn, and he couldn’t breathe very well, and he wouldn’t leave his BiPAP on because he didn’t feel comfortable with it on. They ended up taking him to the ICU, and he ended up passing away,” recalled Lovett. “I was so upset because before he went up, he gave me all of his Reese’s Cups and said, ‘I won’t need these.’ It’s so hard because you want them to get better. Honestly, we’re all just kind of trying to get through this.”
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At Uniontown Hospital’s intensive care unit, the myriad of medications COVID patients are on a stand outside patients’ rooms so nurses can administer the meds without having to don PPE and enter the negative-pressure rooms.
Nurses are frustrated, too, with the number of people who choose not to get vaccinated.
“It’s frustrating. Especially around this area, you get a lot of people who are still in denial about it. They don’t believe it’s what they have, even when they’re really sick,” said Grimm. “What do you think you have if you tested positive and you’re on 30 or 40 liters of oxygen? We just don’t put you on 30 or 40 liters of oxygen for the heck of it.”
Rolaf has had patients tell her they didn’t get the vaccine because it’s not 100% effective at preventing COVID, so even with the jab, they could end up with the virus anyway.
But data show vaccines remain the No. 1 tool for preventing infection, serious illness, or death.
Hess said it’s humbling to work with the nurses and staff, and he worries about the toll the pandemic is taking.
“What keeps jumping out at me is the sacrifice they continue to make. As nurses and health-care workers are leaving, we’re asking the ones here to do more,” said Hess. “They’re missing their kids’ basketball games, family events, to care for those who are in the hospital. They are the most compassionate people I’ve ever been around. The burnout is real, it’s almost palpable, and we need to do whatever we can to make them know they are valued and recognized.”
Currently, the number of hospitalized COVID patients at Uniontown remains high, in the high 40s to low 50s. It’s lower than the peak in December 2020, when case counts were around 80 COVID patients, but with less nursing staff, “it still feels as busy, and patients are as sick,” said Hess.
In the ICU, Halbrook is five hours into her 12-hour shift.
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A woman comforts her husband of 55 years in the intensive care unit at Uniontown Hospital.
She began to cry when she talked about facilitating a final phone call between family from the West Coast and a patient who had traveled to the region with a relative for a funeral and contracted COVID while here. Both of those patients died in Uniontown’s ICU.
“We were on FaceTime with her and her grandkids, and the grandkids were saying, ‘Grandma, you gotta come home and make pancakes. We learned how to make whipped cream to put on them.’ That part was sad because she wasn’t going home. That’s the worst part. It was so hurtful for us because we could actually see what these patients meant to people,” said Halbrook.
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Terry Grimm slips into his personal protective equipment before entering a COVID patient’s room on Uniontown Hospital’s 1 West wing. Donning PPE countless times each shift is something health-care staff nationwide have become accustomed to during the pandemic.
Fellow ICU nurse Erica Harvey dons protective gear as she prepares to enter a patient’s room: scrubs, a gown, goggles and a face shield, N95 mask, hair net, shoe coverings.
It’s a process COVID nurses repeat several times a day.
Headaches, pressure sores on their noses, dry and cracked lips, and rashes on their faces have become a part of the job.
For now, the hospital staff is fighting through exhaustion and bracing themselves for whatever lies ahead.
Halbrook, wearing navy blue scrubs, looks up from a monitor and tilts her head.
“Someday, down the road,” she said, “there will be memories to look back on about what happened and how we lived through this.”
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Rose Mommsen began her nursing career at Uniontown Hospital late last year. She said working through the pandemic is all she’s ever known – and it’s both physically and emotionally draining.