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From the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, board certified doctors have been working on the front lines. They have developed new ways to keep health care workers safe, opened temporary hospitals, and held patients’ hands. Some of them have even been COVID-19 patients themselves.
Below are just a few of their stories.
One of the biggest challenges anesthesiologist Michelle Au, MD, MPH faces on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic is continuing to offer personal, warm care to her patients.
“The primary effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on my everyday work has been related to the implementation of masking and distancing safety precautions and a shift to remote interaction with staff and trainees. Almost instantaneously, all face-to-face meetings at my institution and off-site were rescheduled as virtual meetings or canceled. To reduce the number of employees on campus, the declaration that ‘all work that can be done at home must be done at home’ had immediate impact.”
An incidental meeting at a conference in early 2020 helped forge a coalition and brought critical COVID-19 education and services to Latinx citizens in Gainesville, Georgia.
“Early in the pandemic, we instituted best practices recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to keep our patients and staff safe. This included patient and staff screening (family members were not permitted in our clinic areas), universal mask-wearing, enhanced cleaning of immobilization devices and all surfaces that touch a patient and limiting the number of staff within enclosed spaces.”
As stay-at-home orders were issued to slow the spread of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in states across the country this past spring, board certified physicians turned to telemedicine to continue providing medical care for their patients.
As a Lieutenant Commander in the United States Navy Reserve, plastic surgeon Scott Farber, MD was one of 120 physicians called up and deployed to New York City in March to help its overwhelmed health care system battle COVID-19. As part of a 12-surgeon team, Dr. Farber was sent to NYC Health + Hospitals/Woodhull, a health care system located in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.
“COVID-19 is an incredibly cruel disease—not only does it devastate the body, but its highly contagious nature keeps families from being at their loved ones’ sides in those final hours,” said Zoeb Bootwala, MD, a hospitalist from Georgia. “This social and physical distance has made it even more difficult for families to confidently make timely and compassionate end-of-life decisions for their loved ones.”
Sometimes fighting the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is not about providing direct patient care, but about caring for the clinicians who are.
“When there is a crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, you have to be 100 percent on top of your game—there’s no time to try to play catch-up,” said Gary W. Procop, MD, MS. “My continuing board certification helped me stay up-to-date and prepared me to get through the early days of the pandemic, when we were urgently working to bring up, create, validate, and operationalize accurate and timely COVID-19 testing.”
When Adi V. Gundlapalli, MD, PhD, MS moved from Utah to Atlanta for a position with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), he imagined he and his family would spend his off-hours exploring their new city. But all that changed when the COVID-19 pandemic swept through the United States.
Jill Baren, MD, did everything right. She gowned, gloved, and masked when seeing patients. She changed out of her scrubs, laundered them immediately, and used the wash station in the mudroom off the garage before entering her house. She wore a mask to go grocery shopping. Still, on March 18, Dr. Baren, President of the American Board of Emergency Medicine, was diagnosed with Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19).
When the COVID-19 surge hit his hospital, Milan Amin, MD and his otolaryngology colleagues assumed they would be deployed to monitor the day-to-day care of patients in the intensive care unit. It turned out that their unique expertise in managing airways and tracheostomies was needed more by their hospital colleagues. …
“I will never forget the devastated look on that man’s face as he watched the love of his life get wheeled down the hall,” said Dr. Carter. “Even as I assured him that we would take the very best care of her, I knew there was very little we could do to save her life at that advanced stage of COVID-19 …”
On September 11, 2001, Peter Taub, MD was in Los Angeles, completing his last year of medical training. Born and raised in New York City, he felt out of place as he watched his beloved city suffer in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks that happened 2,700 miles away. When the global COVID-19 pandemic hit New York City in 2020, Dr. Taub was grateful to be present and eager to help his city however he could.
While winding down a lifelong academic career in medicine, Jeffrey Levin, MD, expected to feel a peaceful sense of pride and accomplishment. After all, he helped train the next generation of physicians to provide expert and compassionate care for patients for decades to come. What he didn’t expect was to be serving on a team that would plan the local response to a deadly, global pandemic.
During a global pandemic such as COVID-19 it is tempting to imagine that all health care professionals drop what they are doing and begin to work on that pandemic. Fortunately for their colleagues and patients, they do not.
As the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) virus began to overwhelm hospitals in Seattle and New York, the team at the Temple University Health System (TUHS) started planning for the surge that was surely heading to Philadelphia.
“The two weeks I spent in self-quarantine were almost unbearable,” said Ramon W. Johnson, MD, an emergency medicine physician from Mission Viejo, California. “I felt like I was letting my colleagues and patients down by not being there to help.”
“Inspirational” and “desperate” are two words Gary B. Korus, MD, uses to describe his time on the front lines of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic as a surgeon at Penn Medicine in Philadelphia.
Robert K. Cleary, MD, knew that a global pandemic was coming. He just never imagined he would be one of its victims. Instead of helping patients on the front lines, he found himself in a bed in his own hospital, fighting for his life.
When asked to describe the three weeks she spent during the COVID-19 surge in her busy Detroit hospital’s emergency department, Erin Brennan, MD, MPH, is at a momentary loss for adequate words.
While she would like to accurately describe the horror and seemingly impossible odds she and her team faced, she feels strongly about acknowledging the inspiring strength and generosity she witnessed.
It took just a few minutes for James Ficke, MD to agree to become the director for the Baltimore Convention Center Field Hospital for COVID-19 patients.
“It may be a cliché, but I believe that health care professionals are called to serve the greater good,” said Dr. Ficke. “With my patients’ elective orthopaedic surgeries on hold during the pandemic, I was available and eager to serve on the frontlines to fight COVID-19.”
