Late one recent night, I found myself on the phone with my patient’s brother, trying to explain respiratory failure and COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus.
He had been unable to sleep, he told me, after hours spent online in a futile attempt to understand what might be happening in his sister’s room in our hospital’s intensive care unit.
Many people don’t know what intensive care entails or what would happen if they or a loved one needs to go on a ventilator. While the vast