Emergency doctor: We need help before it's too late

The gall of these fakers...

Last weekend, I was on CNN discussing the importance of supporting the mental and emotional health of medical professionals. I likened this pandemic to an invisible bomb going off in our emergency departments.

Twenty-four hours later, I learned about the death of my colleague, Dr. Lorna Breen. A day later, I learned from media reports that she had died by suicide. It was a one-two punch, like she died twice.
Lorna had survived Covid-19 earlier this month. As her physical symptoms got better, the mental toll of the pandemic continued to get worse. And so I spent Tuesday, my birthday, mourning the most recent devastating loss of a colleague, a friend. And as I mourned, I reflected.

The world is hailing medical professionals as heroes, and don't get me wrong: The public praise has been a welcome shift. Our jobs were harrowing long before this crisis and will remain so long after we return to some semblance of normalcy. I am grateful for the acknowledgment.
But Lorna's untimely death is painful evidence of the hidden battle that so many doctors, nurses and frontline workers are fighting right now. A battle that words of praise, welcome though they may be, simply cannot overcome.

I see it unfold in front of me every day in my emergency department here in New York City. It's not the first time I've worked in challenging circumstances. I saw many tragedies working as a volunteer medic in Iraq over my four weeks on the front line with US-backed Iraqi soldiers. But I never imagined a future where I would care for so many colleagues unable to breathe, presumably due to coronavirus infection.
We treat everyone as if they have it -- that's what risk mitigation calls for. I treated a friend's critically ill father and, atop an already-terrifying situation, initiated difficult end-of-life-care conversations. He survived, but the discussions of whether to intervene and how far under such duress leave scars.
I hadn't conceived of counseling a nurse I know in my department through despair and helplessness after she infected her mother with the virus. Her mother also survived and left the hospital after several days of oxygen therapy, but the trauma of her guilt will endure and take much, much longer to heal.
I never thought I'd become infected myself. To make matters worse, I didn't have access to testing when I fell ill. Fortunately, my symptoms were such that I could convalesce at home -- chills, body aches that turned to an unrelenting headache and then exhaustion -- and return to work a week later. No shortness of breath, no ventilator. Lucky.
I couldn't imagine that I'd see such an alarming number of elderly and nursing home patients dying at rates that none of us had ever experienced. I never thought that patients' families would be barred from visiting their dying loved ones; that I would give them updates over the phone and offer up last-minute video calls to say goodbye. How does one prepare to facilitate a FaceTime goodbye?
We are facing death at such an accelerated rate that the word unprecedented isn't adequate, isn't enough. It is like nothing any of us could have prepared for.

Omygosh! Nobody has ever died before!

This is unprecedented!

Fauci killed her
It wasn't suicide
His scaremongering killed her

And those symptoms! Wow!
Horrible!
Nobody has ever had symptoms like that!

Have you watched Judy mikovits interview yet?

have you paid attention to all the fakery around you ??

confirmation bias you are the number one case of confirmation bias in the world today and nobody knows why? Very weird and stubborn