DOWNEY — Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center celebrated those who left the hospital after recovering from Covid-19 with a balloon display this week.

The hospital set up 260 balloons representing every successfully rehabilitated coronavirus patient treated at the campus.

According to Lilli Thompson, Director of the Physical Therapy Department and Chief of the Rehabilitation Therapy Division, Rancho was forced to adapt from its usual role once the pandemic set in.

“Our primary role in the Department of Health services is to be the rehab hospital for the acute care hospitals within LA County, as well as providing that specialty we have for individuals with very complex presentations that other health systems or hospitals want to refer their patients to us,” said Thompson. “When Covid hit the LA area, and we recognized that our health system was going to be impacted, we did several things.”

“We recognized that our role for the health system may have to change because we don’t have an emergency room. Typically, all of our patients are transfers from other hospitals who are being sent to us because we will meet their needs at that point along their recovery or continuum of care.”

Thompson said that the hospital needed to “move as many patients as we could from our sister hospitals” who were stable enough to be cared for from a medical bed.

“We took patients that we normally wouldn’t have brought over; patients that were highly acute, very complex medical situations,” said Thompson. “We knew we could manage them, and our staff had the skill set and expertise in order to free up beds at the other hospitals so that their ERs didn’t get backed up, trying to avoid the ambulances sitting out in the ambulance bays for hours, trying to manage patients, waiting for space. That was a really critical role we took on.”

 Thompson added that Rancho also took on patients that needed “safe placement” without necessarily needing complex care.

Inevitably, Rancho did end up taking on patients positive with Covid-19.

“We did bring a number of patients were were acutely ill with Covid into our ICUs, again to create space,” said Thompson. “The critical role, the essential role we took on were those patients who had very prolonged, very severe illness and then were on the recovery process.”

“Those are the patients that came in for rehab. Most of them had prolonged stays in the ICU on a ventilator. Because of the microvascular impact of Covid on all of the organs, they may have a lot of organ damage; kidney, dialysis, things like that that really just wiped the body out…We did our specialty there, which is rehab.”

Rancho created a specialty Covid team specifically for rehab, made up of therapists, physicians, and nurses.

The display this week was a celebration of lives saved and rehabilitated during the pandemic.

“Having gone through this traumatic experience, this really challenging year, I think all of us have been touched by it by some way or another,” said Thompson. “We felt that acknowledging the loss that as a nation we’ve experienced, as families, as individuals is really important, but also acknowledging those that survived, and the positive outcomes for so many as well…each one truly is a celebration.”

Rancho also placed a wreath in honor of those who lost their lives to Covid-19.