French hospitals face huge surgery backlogs

Hospitals are increasingly grappling with the double challenge of fighting COVID-19 while also tackling giant backlogs of surgeries postponed by the pandemic. To prevent the collapse of their public health systems, countries hard-hit by the virus in Europe prioritized COVID-19 patients and postponed non-essential procedures and even some essential ones. Hospitals are now trying as best they can to catch up while also treating virus patients.

One of the biggest hospitals in Paris, the Bichat Hospital, this month reopened all 22 of its operating rooms. It is once again performing surgeries that were stopped during virus surges that pushed France's death toll past 55-thousand. Chatting before they go under the knife, the two women picture their lives after surgery. Lolita Andela, who works as a carer for a disabled man, imagines herself being able to slip into dresses that caught her eye while window-shopping with her husband. Caroline Erganian, a retired secretary, hopes simply for a life without pain. Both are bubbly with excitement about their operations to treat chronic obesity.

After multiple false dawns, they scarcely dare believe that their Paris hospital, no longer monopolized by COVID-19 patients, is once again able to perform their weight-reducing intestinal tucks. When the epidemic was burning through hospital resources, the women's operations were pushed back time and again. But after months of waiting, their turn has now come. For these women, yes. But hundreds of thousands of others in France and other European countries hardest-hit by the pandemic remain on hold for medical procedures that could change their lives and health for the better, but which were quickly deemed non-essential when the virus ripped through public health systems.

To prevent the collapse of hospitals, their decks were cleared. Operating rooms were closed. People who had been scheduled for joint replacements to free them from pain, for cataract removals to defog their sight, for cancer checks, and myriad other life-improving and even life-saving procedures, were told to stay home, because staving off COVID-19 and saving the gravely sick took priority.

At the Bichat Hospital in Paris, wards fell silent as staff and resources were poured into critical care units in its basement. With more than 900 beds, Bichat is one of the French capital's largest hospitals, a marvel of modern medicine spread over 16 floors and two basement floors of a giant tower. An Associated Press team spent two days immersed this month with its staff, seeing how they are recovering from the successive virus surges that pushed the number of dead in France past 55-thousand, and how they're bracing for another feared wave of infections.

Bichat was the first hospital outside Asia to report a COVID-19 death, back in February, and was turned upside down when the epidemic struck with full force in March. Makeshift plastic screens were erected to stop contamination spreading, held up with duct tape and bits of wood. Operating rooms and a room roughly the size of a tennis court where surgery patients are reawakened post-op were among spaces that were hastily converted for the floods of sick people, who were plugged into ventilators one next to the other.

With President Emmanuel Macron declaring "We are at war" and putting France into lockdown, Erganian and Andela both immediately understood that their surgeries wouldn't happen. Andela had been due to go first, in April. Erganian had been pencilled in for May.

The delay was more than a mere inconvenience. Erganian weighed 140 kilograms (308 pounds) before surgery; Andela was 133 kilos (293 pounds). Both were terrified of becoming infected by the virus during the treatment delay, acutely aware that obesity puts them at greater risk of dying from COVID-19. Other than for work and groceries, Andela says she barely left the house.

Both gained additional kilos in lockdown. Andela wept when her nutritionist weighed her. The 58-year-old Erganian hopes to shed more than a third of her weight and be free of her knee and back pains, and of her cane. She spent the final weeks praying her phone wouldn't ring with news of another delay. Admissions for COVID aside, hospitalizations across France have plunged during the crisis, with 2 million fewer hospital stays from March to July compared to the same period of 2019, the French Hospitals Federation says.

Cataract surgeries stopped almost entirely for eight weeks during the first lockdown and colonoscopies used to spot cancers plummeted by 87%. There were half as many kidney transplants from March to September, the federation's research also shows. It estimates that France's backlog of patients waiting for postponed procedures has swelled to hundreds of thousands of people. 

(Image Credits: AP)