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Photo by Erin Nelson.
Dr. Michael Luther puts on a face shield as he gets suited up in personal protective equipment before consulting a patient with COVID-19 symptoms in the drive-up testing site at the Grandview Health Homewood office on Oxmoor Road on April 24.
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Photo by Erin Nelson.
Dr. Michael Luther consults a patient with COVID-19 symptoms in the drive-up testing site at the Grandview Health Homewood office onOxmoor Road at the end of April.
Grandview Medicine’s Dr. Michael Luther has been on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic since it began, performing COVID-19 testing at Grandview Medical Group Primary Care in Homewood since the outbreak began in mid-March.
As he and his staff left work Friday, March 13, they were discussing the news about the coronavirus and wondering if it would start affecting the way they saw patients. The answer came just three days later.
Once they arrived back at work Monday morning, they had an emergency meeting. Afterward, the office was transitioned into a new model.
They also set aside parking spaces to do COVID-19 testing. If patients had symptoms, they were to stay in their cars and call the office. They were not going inside, thus keeping the waiting room and exam room from contamination and allowing the more vulnerable patients to still come and have an in-person visit.
“The first week, we saw a few patients a day, about four to five on average,” Luther said.
“The second week our busiest day in the parking lot was 12 patients, then the next week was really busy. During the first six weeks, we’ve done around 140 visits in the parking lot, swabbing those people for coronavirus and only had a few positives.”
The time it was taking to get test results went from three days to seven days, and Luther was looking for a faster way. He found a lab in Huntsville with a 48-hour turnaround and switched over to them, saying, “it’s a lot more clinically reliable to tell someone their results in two days instead of seven."
VISIT OPTIONS
That first week, he was given the go-ahead to do telemedicine. This way, he could continue managing his chronic disease patients without them having to come into the office, which he calls “a lifesaver.”
“The whole Grandview system has done a great job in prioritizing patient health and employee health first,” he said. “Our administrative folks and clinical folks have done a great job, and our patients have been really understanding and appreciative having three different options of how to receive their care.”
As the end of April neared, Luther said he was doing one-third of patient visits in the parking lot, one-third via phone and one-third in person. He said he was glad they were able to take care of their patients.
“This last week [of April] the number of COVID patients started falling off, either because social distancing guidelines were working, or because people just started saying home with mild symptoms and did not seek testing,” Luther said.
Luther alternated between two N-95 masks for over six weeks, and kept one spare in his desk drawer. He also wore a mask piece and face shield and said he had enough gowns and gloves. He chose to wear his N-95 mask during every patient visit, to avoid having to self-quarantine in the event they presented symptoms later.
Leisha Harris, marketing director at Grandview Medical Center, said there has been a significant decline in people coming into the emergency room with other significant issues.
“If you have symptoms of a stroke or heart attack, you need to get here,” she said. “You won’t be in the same area with someone suspected of having COVID, we triage those patients differently. It’s really important the community understands the ER is open for patients other than COVID. How people envision it is very different than how it is.”
FAMILY MATTERS
Luther and his family moved from north-east Alabama to Inverness 15 months ago. He and his wife have four children, two who are students at Briarwood Christian School. She began helping them with virtual learning from home, while Luther continued to work even longer hours than normal. He takes precautions at work, but at home as well.
“I have a wife and four kids who are ages 8, 6, 4 and 2,” he said. “The kids know when I walk in the door, nobody comes and hugs daddy until he has had a shower. I take my work shoes off in the car and wear flip flops into the house. My clothes go in the washer, then I take a shower. I want to limit that surface exposure from person to person since the virus can live for several hours on objects. I’m being as cautious as we can. The bad thing is not if I get exposed, but my family doing so is a big fear of mine.”
In the event that happened, Luther already has all his camping gear out of storage so he would have a tent to sleep in his backyard and use the WiFi in his car to work.
GETTING BACK TO NORMAL
While everyone is ready for life to get back to normal, Luther said if that happens too soon, the number of exposures and deaths could rise. He said Alabama has had more of a hump than a spike, but the number of cases needs to go down before things change.
Luther added that it took China three months to get to that point and believes it may be the end of June or first of July before we are at such a small number of cases we can call it gone.
“If the death rate is 1%, I challenge anyone who says it’s not that bad to get back to normal life,” he said. “Name that one senior citizen in your life who could die from this virus. Think of it that way and be as careful as possible even when things do reopen so we will do better.”
