Clinical The Scope

Clinical takes you deep into the heart of the institution that is a hospital. Hosts Stephen Dark and Mitch Sears delve into the hidden corners of a hospital, where vital roles are performed by people whose untold, compelling lives and remarkable efforts reveal the human dimension to those we turn to when we fall sick.

In the midst of a pandemic, it isn’t only doctors and nurses that face down the invisible killer COVID-19. It’s the men and women who clean the hospital and clinics they work in. Clinical’s Stephen Dark talked to Jessica Rivera, a director of Environmental Services, who gave an intimate, at times heart-rending account of battling the virus one wipe at a time.

Introducing the newest Clinical series: Unit on the Brink: Voices from the COVID Frontline. This multi-part series delves deep into the stories behind the health care workers at University Hospital as they hold the line against the COVID-19 pandemic. Their stories offer a snapshot of the virus bearing down on one state, one group of healers, one Medical ICU. Reported by Stephen Dark, listen as these medical professionals stand united in their sense of a calling even as they risk their lives against an invisible threat.

“It’s a battle of wanting to provide care and wanting to protect yourself and the people you love,” says nurse Megan Diehl. This tug of war is one critical care nurses faced constantly through the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. On the 4th floor of University of Utah Hospital, the medical intensive care unit (MICU) has always treated the very sickest of the sick. The unit’s medical professionals go to extraordinary lengths to save the people in their care. But as the first COVID-19 patients trickled in, these lifesavers discovered that the precautions necessary to protect themselves from the virus challenged the very essence of their duty as healers.

COVID-19 was far from the world’s first go-around with a pandemic. In 2009, H1N1 claimed hundreds of thousands of lives worldwide. For nurses at the MICU who had cared for patients back then, COVID-19 at times was a haunting replay of the painfully familiar fight to treat patients struggling to breathe. As the first COVID patients came in, MICU staff faced ever-changing protocols and the unnerving realization that this virus was even more dangerous than anything they had faced before.

For the citizens of Salt Lake City, by the first weeks of March 2020, nerves were already shredded. COVID-19 positive cases were rising. The governor called for a state of emergency and the city began to shut down. They had spent weeks picking through barren shelves at the grocery stores trying to get their hands on basic necessities. And then, on March 18, the largest earthquake in centuries hit the city. For the medical professionals in our story facing all of this adversity too, they still had a job to do. One that was proving more and more difficult by the day as the severity of the illness in some patients only grew worse.