I Worked the ER During BC’s Worst Heat Wave. One Shift Haunts Me

Anonymous is an emergency room worker at a hospital in B.C.’s Lower Mainland who worked shifts during the record-shattering heat dome from June 25 to July 1, 2021, that killed 619 British Columbians. The worker’s identity is being protected by the Climate Disaster Project because the hospital’s media relations policy requires interview requests with employees to be referred to communications and public affairs staff. The Climate Disaster Project and The Tyee have verified the worker's identity. Most public sector employees in Canada are similarly restricted, threatening the public’s right to know and the historical record of their lived experiences. This account is part of the documentary play ‘Eyes of the Beast’ that runs June 18 to 22 in Vancouver. See sidebar for more details.

We had never seen a heat wave before. I guess everybody, including myself, thought it would be hot, but would it really be that hot? When people say, "Oh, it's going to be hot," we have no context, because it's unprecedented.

Honestly, leading up to it I was a little bit worried. It was a weekend and it was really hot. I started as I normally do. You put your bag away, and then you go in.

When you step into the ER, there's always an energy in the air: a calm kind of energy, or it starts out very chaotic. I remember it was very chaotic. Everybody was running off their feet. I think it was a night shift.

We just don't see heatstroke in B.C. I've never seen it in my career. I'm sure people have seen really severe heat exhaustion, which is very different than heatstroke. Heatstroke means that you cannot cool yourself down at all. Your cooling systems in your body have all malfunctioned, and you are basically cooking inside out. I don't think a lot of people do see it: the case of a little old lady being at home, with no air conditioning, and 40-degree weather. Maybe like on a hot day on a marathon and you're running and things like that?

People were coming in with 40, 41, 42 degrees [body temperatures]. This is not conducive to life because we're all water. You're going to be dehydrated. Your cells will start to die and pop. Then we have so many issues that come with it.

A lot of these people coming in without pulse, already dead. We’re just trying to get heartbeats because they were in cardiac arrest. We call it a code blue when someone's in arrest. That means you jump on the chest, to do CPR. That code blue was called 20 to 30 times. It was awful. I think that was probably the most CPR I've ever heard being done.

It becomes a 20-person endeavour. It's a whole team and we do it very well. But so many code blues and critical patients, like we saw that weekend, how can you do all that? You can't. You have to go bare bones because you’re spread so thin. As soon as they were stabilized, you have to go to the next person and the next person. But then there’s nobody looking after that other person. It becomes unsafe. We were trying to create spaces to put these patients in so we can watch them. I have people out in the hallway that I’m just trying to cool down. It's almost that wartime triage system. There's nobody to really blame, but it's so distressing.

The majority of people coming in were a little bit older. Often they're unconscious, they're not talking. They don't look well. They're very hot to the touch. We do blood work and everything's going to be out of whack.

We put catheters in the bladder, and put cold fluid through. We didn’t have enough cooling blankets with the volume of people coming in. We had people going upstairs because our ice machines broke. We were grabbing ice from upstairs units and bringing them down in buckets. Literally just slapping ice on top of patients. Nothing else could cool them down.

At that point, I'm so tired. I'm dehydrated. I'm running around and don't know what to do. All I can do is focus on my breathing. It's almost like you're shell-shocked. You feel a bit hollow on the inside. You're almost dazed. It's like “What just happened?” And you're not sure. There are no words. My training kicked in. I just couldn't think anymore. You have to go, “What can I do with my ability, with my resources, with my two hands, one brain? What can I do now?”

I still had this image in my brain. We had this one hallway, where we have these crash carts, and they have life-saving medications. They have defibrillators that would shock people back to life. We have maybe five or six carts, in the whole unit department. They were literally next to each other. And they're all ransacked.

I was crying, and I never really cried at work. You can't even take a moment to acknowledge this person passed. You couldn't call family to be with them, hold their hand. I remember seeing a family member just standing in the hallway. And I'm literally running, gunning it across the hall to go to a different room and can't even talk to them.

I think that's honestly the hardest part. We have to lose our humanity in order to try to save other people. We're all very distraught by that. People were suffering and you can't hold their hand. I can't be there in their last moments. For me, it's a thing of the idea that someone died alone. Like literally alone. I have a lot of co-workers and they helped me with that.

I work with such a great team of people, health-care workers. Everybody was all hands on deck, and I'm very proud of everybody. I'm proud of the care I gave as well. But also, it hurts. It felt like 24 hours. That night could break people.

This testimony gathered by the Climate Disaster Project was edited by Aldyn Chwelos, Tracy Sherlock and Sean Holman.