Former Queen’s Medical Center respiratory therapist dies from coronavirus
As the number of coronavirus cases remained in double digits in Hawaii on Thursday, hospital colleagues were remembering a former Queen’s Medical Center respiratory therapist who died from COVID-19 after serving on the front lines against the disease in Dallas.
“A ray of sunshine,” is how former Queen’s colleague Willie Thomas remembered Isabelle Papadimitriou, who succumbed to the virus less than a week after she was diagnosed on June 29.
Papadimitriou, 64 was a respiratory therapist at Baylor Scott & White Institute for Rehabilitation in Dallas. In the islands, she worked at Hawaii’s largest hospital as a traveling contract respiratory therapist for a couple of tours between 2010 and 2012.
While that may not sound like a long time, Thomas said Papadimitriou made her mark on Hawaii. He said she treated her patients — and anyone else she came into contact with — with exceptional kindness and caring.
“I just see her continual smile,” said Thomas, a veteran respiratory therapist who recently retired from Queen’s but is still working in the field. “It sounds cliche, but she was beautiful in the way she treated people. Most of us feel that way about her.”
On Wednesday the Hawaii Nurses Association posted a Dallas-based story about the woman’s plight on its Facebook page, declaring, “One of our Ohana falls to COVID-19.”
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“This brings it home,” said Daniel Ross, the association’s president. “We’ve been lucky in Hawaii. But when you see what’s happening on the mainland, it explains why most health care workers here want people to stay at home, wear a mask and take the proper precautions.”
Papadimitriou is one of more than 530 health care workers across the nation who have died from the coronavirus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An estimated 100,000 have been infected.
“Pretending it’s not a problem is a dishonor to people like Isabelle,” said Ross, who also worked with Papadimitriou at Queen’s.
Meanwhile, Hawaii health officials say community spread, particularly on Oahu, is being blamed for the majority of new COVID-19 cases in the islands — 19 of which were confirmed Thursday.
Many cases have been linked to social gatherings where face masks and physical distancing were not consistently used, officials said.
Of the 19 positive cases reported Thursday, 16 were on Oahu, while the island of diagnosis for the remaining three cases remains under investigation. As of Thursday, there has been a cumulative total of 1,311 cases diagnosed in the state since late February.
Lt. Gov. Josh Green said Thursday a total of 40 confirmed or suspected COVID-19 patients are in Hawaii hospitals, of whom seven are in intensive care units but none are on ventilators. Health officials said 35 of the hospitalized patients are on Oahu and five are on the Big Island.
Hawaii’s coronavirus-related death toll remains at 22. Fifteen of the fatalities have been on Oahu and six on Maui, with one Kauai resident dying in Arizona.
“If people don’t start taking this seriously, they actually will see the devastation of it,” said Thomas, the former Queen’s respiratory therapist.
Thomas described respiratory therapy as one of the most dangerous professions in the health care field right now because COVID-19 is a respiratory disease, and respiratory therapists help patients breath before, during and after a ventilator is used on those who are the most ill.
“It can be scary,” he said. “But you have to think more about taking care of the people who have it.”
Papadimitriou, who reportedly had no underlying conditions, died on July 4, according to her daughter, Fiana Tulip, who set up a GoFundMe page to help pay for her mother’s funeral.
On the page, Tulip describes how her mother bravely served her patients in the face of the growing pandemic in Texas — a current coronavirus hot spot — and then struggled herself before finally succumbing with amazing speed.
“We’ll never know what day she caught COVID-19 or which patient she caught it from, we’ll never know why it all happened so fast and what would have happened had she gone to the hospital sooner, we’ll never know if she’d still be alive if masks were mandated earlier or if Texas reopened later, but one thing we’ll always know is that this beautiful hero died because of her passion for helping others,” she wrote.
