NEW YORK – Greek-American Maria Kefalas, a professor of sociology at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, was featured in a New York Times article on April 20 on the “Pandemic’s Hidden Victims.” She “considers her husband, Patrick Carr, a forgotten victim of the coronavirus,” the Times reported.
In January, Carr, a sociology professor at Rutgers University, “suffered a relapse of the blood cancer that he has had for eight years,” and “once again, he required chemotherapy to try to bring the disease, multiple myeloma, under control,” the Times reported.
However, with the coronavirus beginning to take its toll in Philadelphia, “blood supplies were rationed and he couldn’t get enough of the transfusions needed to alleviate his anemia and allow chemo to begin,” the Times reported, adding that “clinic visits were canceled even as his condition worsened.”
“For Carr and many others, the pandemic has shaken every aspect of health care, including cancer, organ transplants, and even brain surgery,” the Times reported.
Carr began receiving home hospice care on April 7, and passed away on April 16, at the age of 53, the Times reported.
The coronavirus pandemic “expedited his death,” Kefalas told the Times, “I’m not saying he would have beaten cancer, I’m saying it wouldn’t have been four months, this precipitous decline, fighting for blood, fighting for hospice nurses.”
“People like my husband now are dying not because of COVID, but because the health care system just cracked open and swallowed them up,” she said, the Times reported.
The Times report noted the short supply of hospital “beds, blood, doctors, nurses, and ventilators; operating rooms are being turned into intensive care units, and surgeons have been redeployed to treat people who cannot breathe.”
Medical centers are also reluctant to bring in patients suffering from other illnesses besides the coronavirus “unless it is absolutely necessary, for fear of infecting them — or of health workers being infected by them,” the Times reported, adding that “patients themselves are afraid to set foot in the hospital even if they are really sick.”
Read the full report at thenationalherald.com
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