“It’s very easy to get stuck in your own little bubble. Something like this opens your eyes about not only what you can give to your community, but to a nation.”


“Half of our beds were sick COVID people and the other half


were just like a long stay to get people off the streets, people who had no place else to go or who were high-risk patients,” he said. “We had our own little ICU although obviously, equipment and ev- erything at that time was very limited. We could vent and stuff like that, but if we vented them, we tried to get them to a higher facility as fast as we could. Unfortunately, sometimes that was unrealistic.” From the jump, the 30-year-old Mattison was, in his words,


“thrown into the blender,” pushed to the limits of his training and endurance, often to no avail. “They were taking any physician they could, anyone who had a pulse,” he said. “I remember one day, I went down to the Hot Zone, that’s what we called it, and they were like, ‘Hey, Adam. You’re doing ICU.’ I was like, hey man, I’m just a family walk-in provider. This is a little out of my wheelhouse. “They’re like, ‘Well, a neurologist and a dermatologist are doing


38 | OZARKS HEALTHCARE | SPRING 2021


From left:


Mattison visiting Manhattan.


One of the "rooms" in the makeshift hospital.


Healthcare workers testing out boxes they made that helped contain the spray of droplets when intubating patients.


Photos courtesy of Mattison


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