A doctor and physician assistant tested positive on the same day in November, briefly leaving the hospital without anyone who could write prescriptions or oversee patient care. The hospital is full, but diverting patients isn’t an option because surrounding medical centers are overwhelmed.
The situation at Rush County Memorial Hospital in La Crosse illustrates the depths of the COVID-19 crisis in rural America at a time when the virus is killing more than 2,000 people a day and inundating hospitals.
The virus is sidelining nurses, doctors and medical staff nationwide, but the problem is particularly dire in rural communities like La Crosse because they don’t have much of a bullpen – or many places to send patients with regional hospitals full.
The staff shortages have forced people like Eric Lewallen, a Gulf War veteran and alfalfa farmer who moonlights as a radiology technician, to mount a last line of defense. To keep the hospital open, he had no choice but to start living in his RV in the parking lot because he needed to be on site as the only remaining healthy staffer to perform X-rays.
“I’m it,” Lewallen said shortly after begging the hospital laundry staff to start washing his scrubs because he had run out of clean ones.
“To keep a critical access hospital open, you have to have X-ray and lab functioning,” he said. “If one of those go down, you go on diversion and you lose your ER at that point. We don’t want that to happen, especially for the community.”
La Crosse, a town of 1,300 people that dubs itself as the “Barbed Wire Capital of the World” and is home to barbed wire museum, is like many small towns struggling with the virus. Case numbers have soared, there’s an outbreak at the nursing home, and its county has opted out of Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s latest mask mandate.
And there are few larger medical centers to send its sickest patients with the rest of the region also overrun by the virus.
The larger Hays Medical Center, which is just 25 miles away from La Crosse, was always willing to take patients that needed more advanced care in the past. But it turned away 103 transfers in November alone. In the 14 years prior, it had rejected transfers just twice, said Dr. Heather Harris, the medical director there.
Physician assistant Kai Englert was able to fill in for six days at La Crosse, overseeing several COVID-19 patients, one of whom died after no larger hospital would take the patient. The La Crosse hospital doesn’t have a ventilator and the oxygen it provided wasn’t sufficient with the patient’s “chest full of COVID.” But Englert doubts more advanced would have made much difference because the patient was so sick.