On Tuesday, October 19, 2021 at 3:13:02 PM UTC-4, a322x1n wrote:
> <https://www.huffpost.com/entry/texas-covid-embalmers-patrick-huey_n_612f
> eb0be4b0aac9c012139c>
>
> <https://tinyurl.com/pj52zvb8>
>
> Texas Embalmer Shares Nightmare COVID Experiences: 'Unlike Anything I've
> Seen Before' "I don’t know how much longer I can keep working this way,"
> the funeral professional told HuffPost. Noah Michelson, By Noah
> Michelson, 09/13/2021, 09:08am EDT | Updated September 13, 2021.
>
> Patrick Huey contacted HuffPost after reading a story about a
> Florida-based ICU doctor who broke down on CNN while being interviewed
> about patients dying of COVID-19. The Texas-based funeral professional,
> who has worked as an embalmer for the past 30 years and won the South
> Central Texas Funeral Directors Association’s first-ever Embalmer of the
> Year award in 2019, offered to share his own harrowing COVID-related
> experiences, as well as the toll working in the funeral industry during
> the pandemic is taking on him and his colleagues.
>
> His account below has been lightly edited for clarity.
>
> When COVID first started, we really didn’t know a whole lot about how it
> was spread ? or, really, much else. There just wasn’t a lot of
> information out there. A lot of the states were recommending or even
> mandating not embalming bodies because so much was unknown at the time
> regarding how contagious COVID was, how it was spread, the fatality
> rate, and what chemicals effectively killed it.
>
> As time went by, we found that the bodies could be embalmed. That’s our
> preference if you have to store people for any length of time. Our
> opinion is that it’s much, much safer if the body has been embalmed and
> bathed, and then we can store them without having to utilize
> refrigeration.
>
> It wasn’t until about late November or early December of last year when
> the surge really hit us in Texas, and then it was just awful. Just
> awful. We were pulling 22- and 36-hour shifts, and we were short-handed
> to begin with. We went like that until about the middle of March. At
> that point about 65%, or maybe a little less, of the bodies we were
> receiving had COVID.
>
> The death rate in general over the past few years has been
> unprecedented. The baby boomer generation has begun to die, and we are
> seeing more bodies than ever before. Add COVID to that and we’re
> reaching a breaking point.
>
> “We get bodies out of ICU regularly, but not in the condition that these
> COVID bodies are in.”
>
> We’ve just had to buckle down and do the best that we can. The internet
> has been a blessing because it allows all of us embalmers to communicate
> and find out what issues everyone is having because so much of this has
> been unlike anything we’ve seen before. We get bodies out of ICU
> regularly, but not in the condition that these COVID bodies are in.
> They’re tremendously swollen. If they’ve been on a ventilator, that
> often completely runs down their immune system. It also opens them up to
> a lot of sepsis and secondary infections that tend to hang around
> hospitals, like penicillin-resistant staph infections.
>
> These folks were so swollen they were completely unrecognizable. We were
> also getting sent a lot of people who had died from COVID in nursing
> homes back at that time, and many of them had not been dead very long at
> all. Generally when we embalm, we utilize a major artery to inject the
> embalming fluid and we use its adjoining vein for drainage. The blood
> tends to settle out because it’s no longer flowing and it’ll gravitate
> to the dependent part of the body. The longer a body sits, the more
> blood clots that they develop. I was having people that had only been
> dead for a few hours and there were major clotting issues. The clots
> were the size of pancakes ? you never, never see those with someone who
> didn’t die of COVID.
>
> I’ve been doing this for 30 years and pretty much everywhere I’ve worked
> has been medium to high volume. I’m not one of those embalmers that
> works at a place that just does 50 or 60 bodies a year. So I’ve done
> this long enough and I’ve seen enough that I would know when something
> different pops up. COVID is unlike anything I’ve seen before.
>
> Many of the people who were in the ICU were on ventilators, and they put
> adhesive patches on their cheeks. They can easily become septic and they
> drip that septic saliva on the sides of their faces and the skin in that
> area gets infected. We were literally receiving bodies with huge lesions
> on their cheeks or [patches that had gone] gangrene. The sad part is the
> families of these people, at that point, hadn’t been allowed to see
> their loved ones during the several weeks that they were in the ICU. So
> the body comes out in an almost unrecognizable condition, and then you
> have to explain to their family that their loved one doesn’t look
> anything like what they should.
>
> Despite the fact that I specialize in postmortem reconstruction ?
> accidents, trauma, stuff like that ? when the bodies are that swollen,
> there is very little I can do to eliminate that. And for a lot of these
> families, it’s just a tremendous shock. I’ve had husbands and wives die
> within days of each other. I’ve seen entire families wiped out. It’s
> horrible.
>
> With this current surge from [the delta variant], I notice we’re not
> getting bodies out of the nursing homes like we were the last time, most
> likely due to the fact that most of these old nursing home patients have
> been vaccinated. Right now the bodies I’m seeing are ranging from the
> late 20s to the elderly. We’ve had quite a few bodies in their
> mid-to-late 30s, 40s, 50s. I’ve also noticed that with delta, for the
> most part, these people were not spending nearly as much time in the ICU
> before they die. Sadly, that’s been to our benefit because they’re not
> in as bad of a condition as they were with the last surge.
>
> We’re just doing what we can, but we’re constantly worried about our own
> safety while working. At my facility, we’re wearing N95 masks because
> the filtration is so much better and it makes it a good positive seal on
> your face. I’ve got a mask with a respirator that uses the P100
> multivapor cartridges. Aside from that, we’re wearing our standard
> personal protective equipment and taking extra precautions ? keep our
> faces covered and doing whatever we can to keep our risks as low as we
> possibly can. As far as handling the body goes, if you roll the body, if
> you put pressure on the chest, there’s the chance of expelling air from
> the lungs.
>
> After we get done embalming a body, we pack the nasal passages and
> everything else and once it’s bathed well and preserved well, to me,
> it’s as safe as it can possibly be and should not pose a risk to the
> families or anyone else who comes in contact with it. I really wish we
> were embalming them all, but we just don’t have the manpower right now.
> As far as licensed embalmers, there’s a definitely a big shortage,
> especially down here in Texas.
>
> Seeing so many of these people who have passed away who shouldn’t have
> died in the first place and the husbands and wives passing within days
> of each other ? on top of just the mass volume ? is a lot to deal with.
> Although we try to distance ourselves professionally as much as possible
> while doing our jobs, it wears on us. There are a lot of us that
> definitely have some PTSD ? or just traumatic stress. It’s really,
> really hard.
>
> My wife and I don’t get to see much of each other. I’ve got two kids who
> just started college, and they don’t get to see nearly as much of me as
> they would like to. And it’s very difficult. Right now shifts start at 8
> a.m. and we are currently working 19 to 20 hours the first day of our
> two-day shifts. Then we’re back up after sleeping a few hours, and we
> don’t sleep that second night of work. Then I go home and either work
> other places in my town ? I live in East Texas and I drive to central
> Texas for work and, even when I’m home, I often help out at the local
> funeral home here and other places are calling for help ? or, if I am
> lucky, I will sleep 30 hours straight. My downfall or failing has been
> the inability to tell people “no” when they call for help..
>
> I’d say 85% of the people who are coming in right now passed from COVID.
> A lot of them are coming from the ICU. It’s not uncommon to get bodies
> from there, but what is uncommon is to get seven or eight or 10 bodies a
> day.
>
> It’s so bad that we have had to get one of those large government FEMA
> refrigerated trailers. We’ve never had that before. Our facility has the
> ability to hold somewhere around 90 or 100 bodies in the walk-in
> refrigerator in our building, and another smaller one in the garage will
> hold another 18 or so bodies. And we’re full! If it comes down to it and
> we completely run out of refrigeration space, we will wind up having to
> embalm everybody that comes in that we can’t put into refrigeration.
> Basically, if we can’t get a body into refrigeration or buried within 24
> hours, then we have to embalm, and there are only so many people who are
> qualified to do that.
>
> “Although we try to distance ourselves professionally as much as
> possible while doing our jobs, it wears on us. There are a lot of us
> that definitely have some PTSD ? or just traumatic stress. It’s really,
> really hard.”
>
> I don’t know how much longer I can keep working this way. I’ll never
> throw my hands up and just say “screw this!” If the good Lord calls me
> home and I drop dead at the embalming table, then I guess that’ll make
> for a day off.
>
> We are losing staff in places. A lot of new folks are graduating from
> mortuary school. They’re starting to work and are immediately slammed
> with COVID cases and they can’t handle it and and they wind up getting
> out. We’ve had a lot of funeral professionals who have gotten COVID, and
> there have been several I know of who have died from it.
>
> The smaller, independent funeral homes, when they’re dealing with COVID,
> the next thing you know, their entire staff has it. And they pretty much
> have to take the phone off the hook, lock doors and shut down because
> they don’t have anybody to run the place. So, we’ve got a lot of
> embalmers who are traveling around from place to place, just trying to
> help out everybody who has shortages ? just to keep the doors open and
> keep serving the public.
>
> I’m on Facebook and whatever occasionally, but I don’t post a lot about
> my job and about what I do, because it’s just my job and I just do it.
> [The embalmers] are just doing the best that we can, and I wish that
> people would just do the best that they can to stay safe. I want
> everyone to take this seriously and to remember that the repercussions
> of their actions run downhill, and we funeral professionals are down
> near the bottom of that hill.
>
> Lastly, I’ll just say I wish this would quit being such a political
> thing. People want to blame one party or the other, and I don’t know
> what the answer is. I do know that the studies have shown the
> vaccination works and I wish more people would get it. And sometimes we
> have to have our freedoms infringed upon just a little bit for the
> betterment of the entire population. We’re just trying to do our part ?
> and we wish everyone else would do the same.
>
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