Showing Up

Fred Hund, MD

My role as a doctor has always been the same. I go in and I serve patients. I’m not here to judge them. I take care of anyone and I think that’s a powerful statement about our profession – that everybody gets love and compassion and good care.

Everybody gets love and compassion and good care.

Fred Hund, MD, Hospitalist

As the chief of staff at Rice Memorial Hospital, I remember discussing what we would do if there weren’t enough ventilators. We had all kinds of systems in place and boy, we got right up to the edge.

One night, we got a call from Redwood Falls about a patient that was very sick, had arrested at home and was on a ventilator. I said, ‘I think I can take care of this patient,’ even though it’s more than we usually take care of at our hospital. There was a pregnant pause on the other end and they said, ‘well, the ICU coordinating center in Minnesota says the nearest ICU bed available right now is in Milwaukee.’ I said send them up, and we took care of them.

We ended up taking care of a lot more critical stuff than we usually do. If you would have told me three ago that I would have people on ventilators prone instead of supine, and paralyzed, which you have to do when somebody is just about dead from breathing problems. I would’ve said, you know, that’s all really interesting, but that’s for the big hospitals in the cities, we’ll never do that. And yet it became routine.