Open Lines

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Anchor lead: When someone who’s been hospitalized with Covid-19, coming home can be a challenge, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Helping people to manage coming home after being hospitalized with Covid-19 takes a team, and Adam Kaplin, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins who’s working with these patients, says preconceptions both family and patient have need to be examined.

Kaplin: They feel like their family thinks they’re a pariah.  But when they actually ask their family thinks that they don’t want to hug them because they’ve been so ill, they don’t want to be reinfected or something, so they just have to talk about it, just to make it explicit. If you communicate with body language and everything else as opposed to direct communication you’re having a conversation but not controlling the content.  So a lot of times its just go talk, lay it on the line. Oh my husband is really worried about me and that’s why he didn’t hug me and wouldn’t sleep in the room.   :33

Kaplin says open communication about expectations and needs is key. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.