A letter to Gov. Little from my Boise hospital bed: Take a stronger stand on vaccines

Dear Governor Little,

I am writing this from my hospital room at St. Luke’s main hospital in Boise. I am here because I had colorectal cancer surgery due to a diagnosis from a colonoscopy. This surgery was necessary and urgent, as was, it turns out, the colonoscopy. Luckily for me, it wasn’t postponed because of the hospital being filled with unvaccinated COVID patients.

Following doctors’ orders, I walked around the floor I was on to help with the healing process. I noticed all the rooms with warning signs on the doors that said, “Do not enter without proper protection.”

I watched a nurse suit up with a full-head-cover breathing device and yellow hazmat suit. I was taken aback that there were COVID patients on the same floor very close by. I asked, and was told there are “lots” throughout the hospital.

The nurses are so overwhelmed I rarely see them in my room. There are room call alarms going off constantly. After realizing there were a lot of rooms with COVID patients, I decided walking laps in my room was safer than walking the halls.

I know you recently visited the hospital and saw all of this firsthand and reported to the media that this was unnecessary and people need to get vaccinated. You obviously believe vaccinations work. They are the tool at our disposal to end the pandemic.

I read now that you (or I assume the state of Idaho) are considering suing President Biden over his recently announced vaccine mandate.

I am very disappointed and view this as very hypocritical. The virus is apolitical. It doesn’t care what party you belong to. People have been “urged” to get vaccinated for months. It’s been proven effective just by the sheer numbers of people who have been vaccinated and how well it is protecting them. Urging has proven not to work.

Unvaccinated people are getting sick, spreading the virus, clogging the hospitals, endangering the lives of people they come in contact with. As the hospitals get fuller with COVID patients, it could have affected my surgery, which was life-or-death for me.

I hear that mandating vaccinations is an affront on individual rights. This is overpoliticizing.

Vaccinations for other diseases (smallpox, tetanus, polio etc.) have been mandated before and saved countless lives. People have the right to be safe and not harmed by unvaccinated people. Right now they are doing great harm to our medical system throughout the state. People are being denied routine and urgent care because there is no room to accommodate them.

I am lucky. I was healing very well and didn’t need constant care in the hospital. The nurses were always there when I needed medications, etc. Every time they were in my room, their pagers were calling them to another room. They were keeping up, but the stress was showing. They are the soldiers taking the brunt of the war.

In conclusion, I wish you would take a stronger stand on vaccinations. Reacting to the screaming crowd yelling everything Biden does is outrageous and against their rights won’t win this war and it isn’t in the best interest of the health and well-being for all the good people of Idaho.

And it is entirely unfair to put the burden of their way of ending the pandemic (getting sick and dying to gain immunity instead of getting vaccinated) on the hospitals and especially the nurses. If you insist on taking this path then I think the state needs to set up state-funded locations for unvaccinated COVID patients to go to get care and keep the other hospitals open to treat the other patients and keep the health of Idaho a priority.

Thank you,

Jerry Hayward, Featherville