THE DESANTIS FLU:

 A young, unvaccinated mom of three was more fortunate than some after being admitted to Catholic Medical Center's intensive care unit recently. Before she died, she had time to call home and request that her children be vaccinated.

An unvaccinated male patient in his early 50s didn't have that option. He needed a breathing tube placed down his throat to his windpipe within 20 minutes of arriving at the ICU. It's a procedure that requires patients to be sedated, and in some cases medically paralyzed so they don't resist. They are unable to speak, so his call home fell to ICU resource nurse Lynn Harkins.

"I don't want to cry," Harkins said, pausing. "She was just sobbing on the phone. They've seen on the news that ventilation is not a good prognosis." The man died.

But the awareness often comes too late, especially for those who think youth and health are protection enough against COVID-19 health complications, including death. The leadership teams at the CMC and Elliot Hospital, both in Manchester, allowed the Bulletin inside their emergency rooms and ICUs in recent days, hoping scenes from the front lines would persuade the unvaccinated to get vaccinated.

"I'm not saying that people who are vaccinated aren't getting sick. They are," said Christine Barry, a nurse manager at CMC. "But they are able to stay home and be sick. The ones that are here? That's where we are seeing the deaths of the ones that are unvaccinated.

Hospital leaders from around the state are sounding the alarm as the state hits record high hospitalizations (454 on Monday) and heads into what they predict will be the worst four to six weeks of the pandemic. They point to a perfect storm of the more contagious and deadly delta variant and decisions to forgo vaccination and masking while moving large gatherings indoors.

Keilani Lime of Vergennes was just two days away from surgery at the Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital last week when she learned that it had been canceled.

The New Hampshire hospital, which is part of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health network, needed to free up beds and staff amid a surge of COVID-19 patients. That required postponing some upcoming surgeries, including a lumbar shunt procedure Lime has been waiting on for more than five months, in the hope that it will reduce pressure on her spine caused by a congenital defect and several painful cysts.

The pressure has become so intense that it's started to erode the base of her spine, and Lime recently started losing strength in one of her legs. With no idea when her surgery will be rescheduled, the 32-year-old now fears that the condition could worsen to the point where she can no longer walk on her own.

"I feel like the sand is falling rapidly through the hourglass," she said, fighting back tears.

Lime represents the collateral damage of the latest COVID-19 surge, which has clogged New England hospitals with mostly unvaccinated patients in recent weeks, pushing an already overburdened health care system beyond its capacity.

The ripple effects hurt many more people than just those infected. Hospitals have canceled hundreds of surgeries such as Lime's that require overnight stays. That includes roughly 250 procedures at the University of Vermont Medical Center and many more at hospitals across the border in New Hampshire.

The logjam means rural hospitals are finding it difficult to transfer patients who urgently need specialized care to hospitals that can provide it.

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