Washington:
Joseph Varon, a medical doctor treating coronavirus individuals at a Texas hospital, was functioning his 252nd day in a row when he spotted a distraught elderly man in the Covid-19 intensive care unit (ICU).
Varon’s comforting embrace of the white-haired man on Thanksgiving Day was captured by a photographer for Getty Images and has gone viral about the globe.
Varon, chief of employees at United Memorial Medical Center in Houston, told CNN he was getting into the Covid ICU when he saw the elderly patient “out of his bed and trying to get out of the room.”
“And he’s crying,” Varon stated. “So I get close to him and I (ask) him, ‘Why are you crying?'”
“And the man says, ‘I want to be with my wife.’ So I just grab him and I hold him,” Varon stated. “I was feeling very sorry for him. I was feeling very sad, just like him.”
“Eventually he felt better and he stopped crying,” Varon told CNN on Monday, which he stated was his 256th consecutive day of function.
“I don’t know why I haven’t broken down,” the medical doctor stated. “My nurses cry in the middle of the day.”
Varon stated the isolation of the Covid unit was challenging for several individuals, specifically the elderly.
“You can imagine,” he stated. “You are inside a room where people are coming in spacesuits.
“When you are an elderly person, it really is additional challenging mainly because you are alone,” he said.
“Some of them cry. Some of them attempt to escape,” he said. “We really had somebody who attempted to escape by way of a window the other day.”
Varon said the elderly man in the picture is “undertaking a lot improved.”
“We are hoping that just before the finish of the week he’ll be capable to get out of the hospital,” he said.
Varon also had a message for people who are not taking precautions amid the pandemic.
“People are out there in bars, restaurants, malls,” the doctor said. “It is crazy. People do not listen and then they finish up in my ICU.
“What people need to know is I don’t want to have to be hugging them.
“They require to do the standard factors — hold your social distance, put on your masks, wash their hands, and steer clear of going to locations exactly where there are a lot of people today,” he said. “If people today would do that, healthcare workers like me could hopefully rest.”
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