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Christmas in the ICU: Prayers, pain, few miracles. ‘Jesus is holding your hand. Don’t let go’ - Los Angeles Times
BRITTNY MEJIA
It was a perfectly COVID Christmas.
In the morning, Angelica Rojas got the best present of her life. The doctor told her that the man she had married six years ago was awake and getting better after nearly a month in the intensive care unit at Providence St. Jude Medical Center.
By the afternoon, the virus sought to steal back the gift.
“Heavenly Father, please eradicate this fever out of his system,” Rojas prayed Friday, as she watched Eduardo through an iPad screen. A damp washcloth lay on the 50-year-old’s head. A tube stuck out from his neck.
On Christmas Day in the intensive care unit in Fullerton, there were no carols — just a chorus of beeps that nurses knew signaled a low heart rate or oxygen levels dropping. There were no decorations, no tree, not much joy. The only splashes of red and green in the 32 rooms were the wires snaking across some patient beds.
“Heal him from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet,” Rojas pleaded. “We ask this in the precious name of your son Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, amen.”
In the summer, at its peak, Providence St. Jude in Orange County had about 70 patients with COVID-19. As of Christmas morning, there were 190. Of those, 42 were in the ICU.
That day, in 4 North ICU, a family said goodbye to a loved one taken off the ventilator.
The painful Christmas scene unfolded in a county that has been the most vocal against statewide restrictions. Earlier this
month, the sheriff said he would not enforce Gov. Gavin Newsom’s stay-at-home order. In Huntington Beach — ground zero for protests against statewide shutdowns
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