A lonely elderly patient was caught on camera breaking into tears while being comforted by a doctor on Thanksgiving Day.
The heart-wrenching moment took place at the United Memorial Medical Center’s ICU in Houston, Texas, where photographer Go Nakamura took a photo of Dr. Joseph Varon embracing an unnamed senior patient.
As the doctor explained, the elderly man was upset because he couldn’t see his wife whom he dearly missed on Thanksgiving.
“As I’m going inside my covid unit, I see this elderly patient is out of his bed and trying to get out of the room, and he’s crying,” Dr. Varon recalled on CNN’s New Day.
“So I get close to him and I tell him, ‘Why are you crying?’ and the man says, ‘I want to be with my wife.’”
According to the compassionate doctor, the patient was able to calm down after he embraced him in his arms and “just held him” until he felt better.
“You can’t imagine. You’re inside a room where people come in spacesuits. You have no communication with anybody else – or by phone if you’re lucky – and when you’re an elderly… it’s even more difficult because you feel you are alone. You feel isolated,” Dr. Varon added.
As the doctor revealed, he has shown up for work for 256 days without a break. While the staff at his hospital are reportedly doing their best to comfort their patients, Varon admitted that “we have so many patients sometimes that we cannot hold every patient or grab the hand of every patient.”
“My nurses in the middle of the day, they will start crying, because they are getting so many patients, and it’s a never-ending story,” he added in an interview with CNN.
“When they finish finally getting a patient in, they get a phone call from the ER that there is another patient getting admitted.
“My hospital is full. I just opened two new wings so that I can accommodate for the next few days, because I know that a lot of people are going to get sick after Thanksgiving.”
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