An ICU nurse on the frontline against COVID-19 has spoken out helping the wife of a 35-year-old coronavirus victim with no underlying health conditions FaceTime with her dead husband.
This comes as healthcare professionals around the world are putting their lives on the line to battle the global pandemic, witnessing heartwrenching situations as they do so.
Michael Kouridakis, who has been an ICU nurse for 25 years, opened up about the incident to Nightline co-anchor Juju Chang, per ABC News. The FaceTime call between the wife and her husband happened just moments after he passed away.
Nurse Michael Kouridakis recalls the heartwrenching moment below:"I used to joke you could only get PTSD if you have feelings. Even the most hardened practitioner - everybody cries at work. It's just part of it now," Kouridakis said.
"I had a 35-year-old patient die on me the other day with nothing significant in his medical history. This is a horrible, horrible disease," he said. "People die alone now, and that's unusual."
The nurse explained that prior to contracting COVID-19, the unidentified 35-year-old had been healthy. The man's wife had asked if she could FaceTime him shortly before he passed away, and Kouridakis said "absolutely".
"I straightened up the room and made sure he looked nice for the call. And the monitor started alarming. I looked up and his heart rate was dropping, his blood pressure was dropping and within just a minute or two he was almost gone," he said.
"I just stopped what I was doing and I went with him and I talked to him. I said that his wife was thinking about him and I'd just spoken to her, you know, and that his family loved him and missed him," Kouridakis said, holding back tears. "I just tried to say the things that I thought I might want to hear if it was me."
He continued, "I just called her and let her know that he passed away. And she still wanted to FaceTime with him."
"Then she handed the phone around and gave it to their son, a 10 or 12-year-old boy. That was hard," Kouridakis added. "He just said, 'Papi, Papi, please don't leave me alone in this world.' You know, that was it."
A nurse is pictured below donning protective equipment to battle COVID-19.
"[I] hung up the phone and then did what I do, got him ready and then I got two more patients from the ER. The beds don't stay empty for very long with this," Kouridakis said.
The nurse then compared the difficulties that he is experiencing to fighting a war.
"I guess walking into combat, at least you know where the firing is coming from and you can shoot back. We walk into this without any weapons," he explained.
The John Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center reports that there have been a total of 873,767 confirmed cases of COVID-19 globally and 43,288 deaths at the time of writing.