'Such is life': In virus wards, death is a foe but a fact · The One Hot News

“Seeing people dying one after the other after you’ve spent hours and hours in a room, doing everything you can, really, to get them out of there is very, very tough," says Melanie Serra, a paramedic at the ICU ward in the Bichat Hospital in Paris. The former fire officer was among the last staff members who had suited up in protective gear and tended the man in his final hours, rolling him onto his side and massaging his back, shoulders, buttocks and heels to slow the buildup of bed sores. At the end, the monitors that show vital signs of all ICU patients — the markers of existence, rendered in colored numbers and graphs of peaks and troughs — signaled that the man in Room No.