Tallahassee Hospital Staff Share Heartbreaking Stories of ‘Talking Dead’ Covid Patients: Awake, But Lungs Too Damaged to Survive Without Machines

There’s a heartbreaking new term emerging from the Covid ward of Tallahassee Memorial Hospital: the “talking dead,” referring to patients whose lungs are so damaged they cannot survive without machines, but who are still awake and aware of their fate.

CNN correspondent Polo Sandoval reported from Florida’s capital city, just across the street from the large hospital complex. The day before, a judge had struck down Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R-FL) ban on school mask mandates, ruling that the governor did not have the constitutional authority to issue such a ban.

DeSantis was vowing to appeal, Sandoval told CNN Newsroom host Jim Acosta, and mentioned some of Florida’s most recent Covid data: 150,000 new Covid cases in the past week, the highest number for any seven-day period since the pandemic began in March 2020.

Tallahassee Memorial Hospital, he continued, was currently seeing the most Covid patients they have seen in “a very long time.” In January, TMH had about 41 patients, but now that number was averaging 135.

Sandoval shared a conversation he had with a TMH official earlier in the day:

The situation so heartbreaking right now that many of those doctors, many of those nurses, are referring to some of these patients that are the sickest of the sick as the, quote, the talking dead. I asked why? And the answer is also really heartbreaking here. That’s because that refers to some of those patients whose lungs are so heavily damaged by this virus that they can no longer breathe on their own.

But here’s the thing. Those are patients who are still awake right now, who are still conscious, so they are having these very difficult conversations with their doctors and their nurses, and facing that very tough reality that if that life-sustaining equipment that’s breathing for them is removed, as this hospital official described it for me, they could be dead in a matter of minutes. And that really does speak to the heartbreak of what’s happening in many of these hospitals throughout the Sunshine State.

“It’s such a devastating situation, what we’re seeing there in Florida right now,” replied Acosta.

The local paper here in Tallahassee, the Tallahassee Democrat, had their own coverage of these “talking dead” patients in an in-depth article by photojournalist Alicia Devine, who interviewed TMH doctors, nurses, hospital officials, and patients.

TMH Chief Clinical Officer Ryan Smith, also a registered nurse, told Devine that he had recently picked up a nursing shift in one of the hospital’s Covid units in order to see firsthand what TMH’s medical staff were experiencing.

“The first part of my shift, I had my first few patients look at me and say, ‘Don’t let me die,'”said Smith. The other nurses who were on shift with him explained to him the damage caused by the intense oxygen treatments needed to keep Covid patients alive.

Some doctors came to the gut-wrenching conclusion that life in the COVID unit involves spending long periods of time among the “talking dead.”

“As soon as you remove them from the devices they no longer made it,” Smith recalls. “To watch how quickly they dwindle down is the hardest thing for me.”

Nurses and staff struggle daily to wean patients off oxygen. Too often, when it seems like patients are ready to breathe on their own, they quickly get worse.

“The ‘talking dead’ didn’t make sense to me until I saw it firsthand,” Smith says. “It’s how quickly they decompensate when they don’t have that oxygen.”

Smith pauses.

“The rest of the world can’t see what goes on behind these doors,” he says. “We want COVID to go away, but the reality is that it is here. It’s real. It impacts a lot more people than it should.”

The Democrat confirmed that the vast majority of the TMH patients with Covid were unvaccinated:

On Monday, when the Tallahassee Democrat was allowed in to the ward, there were 125 patients admitted to TMH. Of those patients, 107 were unvaccinated and two were children.

There were 43 patients considered critically ill in the COVID ICU and 39 of them were unvaccinated.

Watch the video above, via CNN.