Valley respiratory therapist likens caring for COVID patients to a battlefield

PHOENIX — Two years into the COVID pandemic, a Valley health care worker describes her days working in the intensive care unit as “a battlefield.”

Joya Montgomery works as a respiratory therapist at Banner Estrella Medical Center in Phoenix. She cares for COVID-19 patients and helps intubate them.

During the pandemic, her workload has tripled and even quadrupled at times. She said the worst it ever got was two summers ago.

“That’s when it really exploded,” she told KTAR News 92.3 FM. “Things that we never thought possible, became possible. Taking on loads that you didn’t know that you could handle but you needed to. There just wasn’t enough of us.”

The hospital got so packed with COVID patients that they had to add a third ICU unit and start double-bunking patients in a room designed for one.

“We’ve even held patients in the ER with ICU nurses because we just didn’t have room for them,” Montgomery said.

The hospital also had to increase the number of ventilators from 11 to nearly 70, which meant an even bigger workload for Montgomery. She recalled caring for up to 17 coronavirus patients on ventilators at one point.

Even though the hospital isn’t as packed with COVID-19 patients as before, Montgomery said her workload is still “relatively high.”

The immense effects of being on the frontlines of the pandemic also are still emotionally draining.

Montgomery said she sometimes cries on her 45-minute drive home from work, thinking about the COVID-19 patients she saw pass away.

“You have to go home knowing that it doesn’t matter if you did the best you could – sometimes no matter what you did, everything we tried – it didn’t work out,” she said, adding that she has seen families pass away and that patients dying from COVID have gotten younger.

Montgomery added that she gets frustrated when she hears people say COVID “is really not that bad.”

She asked that people understand how serious the pandemic still is and to be patient with health care workers like her whom she stressed have to “triage just like in a battlefield.”

“We take what we can, and we do what we can with the resources that we have,” she said. “It doesn’t always work out the way we want it, but that’s the way it is.”

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