Photo from Twitter.
I am a medical doctor and have been retired 11 years. I don't have a medical license anymore so I am not helping with this pandemic. And my knowledge has certainly waned in those 11 years. But my son is an MD. He is Chief of General Surgery in a large Midwestern University Healthcare Organization. He works very hard normally and I often worry about him and all of his responsibilites as a busy general surgeon, director of various sub departments of the Surgical Dept, as active member of multiple national surgical organizations, and as Chief of the Department. Well, now he has a huge burden on top of all that mentioned above. Elective surgery of course has been stopped so a large source of his income has dried up. Now he just does emergent surgery. That means every surgical case is an unknown and big risk. The patient is very sick, otherwise surgery would not be necessary. This makes every case much more anxiety producing. Add to that COV 2. The patient might be infected which until recently would be unknown to the surgeon and his staff. He was looking forward to a short test that can give a result in 15 minutes. He has that now but that does not take away the risk of doing surgery on an infected patient. There is some indication that for fear of causing aerosols of infected material in the OR, electric cautery should not be used. This increases the risk and the time of the surgical operation with more bleeding risk as well. On the phone recently he told me he operated on a patient that morning and that patient's test had been negative. He was doing another surgery later on Sunday and didn't yet know the COV 2 status of that patient.
Remember that this man and all his surgtcal colleagues and staff go into the hospital every day where dozens of infected patients are entering the ER, being evaluated and many of them being admitted to the hospital, to ICU, etc. My son enters all of these regions to see sick patients of his own whom are pre op or postop for other reasons. Think of the level of his exposure to this virus every day. My son is 49 years old and at the peak of his surgical career. But he has Type II diabetes mellitus. He is just on a single medication, metformin, and he follows his diet, exercises, and controls his blood sugar meticulously. His usual Hemoglobin A1C is 6.3 which is very good for a diabetic. Still we know that just having diabetes does add some risk of complications should he get the disease. He knows this every day as he enters the hospital, or his office, or the ER, or the OR.
On top of all this anxiety, he is the Chief and has to direct the 35 or so surgeons that are in his department. He has to think about all the ramifications of this pandemic on his department. And he has to participate in hospital meetings that try to plan for the surge, as they are calling it now. In his city, the surge is expected in about 2 weeks, but they already have a lot of ICU beds taken up by COVID 19 patients. There has been the usual shortage of Personal Protective Equipment, (PPE). The hospital had already taken enlightened steps to preserve N95 masks, by limiting each individual worker in the number used and were trying to sterilize the masks by exposing them to UV light for a period of time. My son made the comment that because of the high costs of medical care in this country, he as the Chief of Surgery had benn encouraged to cut costs again and again. One of the ways this could be done was to decrease the inventory of PPE. The hospital had done a good job of this. Now there was a shortage and no storage to back up the new intense needs. I am sure that the meetings of the leaders of this hospital are very intense, and there is no doubt discussion of the worsening spread and the increase of patients that will appear deathly ill with COVID 19.
There is no doubt that the job my son has loved and has devoted his whole life to without any other interests beside his family, has now become a daily source of anxiety and despair. The pandemic situation has not spared my son's homelife. His two sons, 13 and 10, are home from school and trying to engage in some degree of virtual learning. But they are missing their school friends and cannot participate in sports and music lessons, and other activities that basically define these young boys at this stage of their life. My daughter in law teaches pharmacy at a local college and is now teaching virtually from home. She is also trying to manage her son's studies, and to manage the household. In addition, she has just gone through a trauma. Her stepfather has died from a fall and head injury leaving her slightly demented mother alone and unable to take care of herself. She has made 4 or 5 trips down to the south of the US to the funeral, and to visit the family. And after arranging by phone a nursing home for her mother, she had to drive down to the south again this past week to get her mother admitted and moved in. Her mother, with some agitational mental issues, will have to be quarantined in her room for 2 weeks. My daughter in law has no idea how this will turn out.
As you can imagine, when my son comes home from his work, things are not calm and easy at home either. He worries about all that his family is going through at this time as well. When I spoke with him, on Sunday, I heard the stress in his voice. He has always been a very hard worker, and I have always worried about him taking on too much for one doctor, for one human being to handle. But I had never heard the tone in his voice that I heard on Sunday. He spoke softer than ever, and there was a note of despair in his voice. My second son had talked to him a couple days before and had been told that this brave doctor had lost 12 pounds since this pandemic had hit our country. His anxiety was preventing him from sleep. He had only been getting 2 hours of sleep a night for various reasons, but no doubt largely from worry. When he spoke with his brother, he had finally been able to sleep a couple of nights for 6 hours. He had taken the time to organize and get all the family finances in order to have it prepared for his wife in case something would happen to him. He is certain that he is going to get this virus and he is deathly afraid it will cause complications because of his diabetes. I tried to tell him that he had only had diabetes for a couple years and not like me and others of my age, it had not taken a toll yet on his body. Also he maintains meticulour control of his blood sugars as I have said. But all of this weighs greatly on his mind. I am worried that he is almost at the breaking point.
Then I see nurses on TV crying about their experiences in the ER and in taking care of the very sick COVID 19 patients. Our death rate rises. And the number of infected and therefore the number of very sick continues to rise. There is not really an end in sight yet for our healthcare workers, and our first responders. I just wanted to present to the public a view of what life is like in a doctor's or for that matter any hosptal worker's role right now. These are people with the bravery of the first line infantry soldier on D day. We will never repay them for what they are doing in every city in our country.
Please God, bless them and help them do their job, and protect them not only from the virus but also from the worry and despair that sits next to them every minute of every day and of some nights. Please provide the support and calm that only you can supply. Amen
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