Staff Emergency Physician, St. Luke’s/Baylor Hospital, Houston, Texas
“I was in the Army for 10 years prior to moving into the civilian world in 2017. I
did my training at Carl R. Darnall Army Medical Center in Fort Hood, Texas. And then
I was stationed at William Beaumont Army Medical Center in El Paso. El Paso had more
veterans, and Fort Hood had more healthy young servicemen—lots of kids, and the ER
was always bustling with young families. … Now I’m drawing on the things that I learned—my
skill set, my mentality—compartmentalizing my work life versus my home life. I am
used to the critical care aspect, but it’s the preparation for going to and being
at work that are different. As a breastfeeding mom, now I’m taking precautions for
myself and my three-month-old. … I work my shifts fully donned in my own PPE, and
I have to doff everything when I pump breast milk in my office. It’s a decontamination
ritual that takes me about 15 minutes, and then I pump for about 22 minutes. I do
that three times during each nine-hour shift while managing critical patients, taking
calls from nurses, doing verbal orders, admitting patients to the hospital, checking
lab results. … There’s the mental worry that I didn’t doff appropriately, and I’m
trying to keep the breast milk as sterile as possible. … At home, my eight- and seven-year-olds
are always asking, ‘Mom, you’re going to fight the coronavirus today, right?’ And
my three-year-old says, ‘And you’re going to win!’ … The hardest part is when I come
home. Usually I’ve been gone for at least 10 hours, and my kids haven’t seen me all
day; they want to hug Mom, jump on Mom. I sneak in the front of my house, and I get
completely stripped down, and then hop in the shower for 30 minutes, scrub, scrub,
scrub. … The community support for us has been amazing. But I’ll say generally, for
the physicians: we’re exhausted. … I’m meeting with people’s families and they can
only see a tiny bit of me. I can’t even hold people’s hands. … Our cases are inching
back up over the last four days since we opened up our state of Texas. I am concerned
about the uptick. We’re not ready to reintegrate everyone back into the society at
this point. … I wish I had a camera on me so that I could blast from the rooftops
what this is actually doing to people. One of my close friends, 31 years old, no medical
problems—she wound up in the ICU, intubated on ECMO [extracorporeal membrane oxygenation].
She was sedated for six weeks. She’s in recovery now. . … Somebody said to me, ‘You
know, you’re like a real-life hero.’ I never considered myself a hero. I always just
said, ‘I answered the call.’ ”
As told to Janice Fisher
May 23, 2020
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