The Next Coronavirus Nightmare Is What Happens After the ICU
When Janet Mendez first got off the ventilator, she had no idea who she was.
“[The hospital staff] kept calling me Maria,” she told The Daily Beast. “I said, OK, that’s my name.’”
Except, of course, it wasn’t. Maria is her mother, who had been anxiously calling Mount Sinai in upper Manhattan every day since her 33-year-old daughter was hospitalized with COVID-19. Somewhere along the way, the staff had misplaced Mendez’s ID tag—maybe they’d never given her one at all—and mixed up her name with her mother’s. After 10 days in the intensive care unit, Mendez was too confused to correct them.