Resident Physician Contributing Writer
New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center
Montreh Tavakkoli is a resident in internal medicine at New York Presbyterian-Weill Cornell. She obtained her master's degree in Biotechnology from Columbia University and her medical degree from UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine. Her background is in cancer research, having contributed to the development of a leukemic stem cell directed therapy in acute myeloid leukemia as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Fellow at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. She is starting her fellowship in hematology/oncology at the University of Pennsylvania in July.
One of my good friends was in critical condition in the intensive care unit for weeks due to the coronavirus. I had become her point of contact. I, a physician, had for the first time become a patient’s “relative” in this pandemic. And with that, I thought I would share an excerpt from my diary.
I was appointed to do the morning shift in the COVID ward of our respected hospital. The unit is a negative pressure area and, to us doctors, it is comforting as we embark on the Icarus flight.
I’m a soon-to-graduate allergy and immunology fellow and the circumstances surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic have catapulted every single physician into uncharted, and sometimes strange circumstances.
It is difficult to put into words the level of frustration and despair that I have felt over the last few days watching the schizophrenic national response to this COVID-19 crisis and its detrimental effects on the work conditions of my colleagues. As an internal medicine physician working in Utah, it feels like it is the calm before the storm as emergency room and urgent care volumes are down as people try to socially distance to correct the spread of this virus. Other areas of the country are not so lucky.
As I check in on my patients each morning, I wonder if some will unexpectedly decompensate and die over the coming weeks. I think about myself and my co-residents who are in the hospital all day swabbing patients for COVID-19 without adequate personal protective equipment. Many of my co-residents are on home isolation as a result of this exposure, waiting for their test results and praying that our government will step up and fund more mask production, or civilians will return the N95s they’ve hoarded, or the set of a TV medical drama will donate their props to us.
It was a beautiful late winter Sunday, and my husband and I decided to drive to Plum Island, in the quaint sea town of Newburyport just north of Boston, for some bird-watching and ocean views. I wondered how my sister-in-law was doing — her wedding was scheduled in just seven days, and she and her fiancé had already been faced with tough decisions because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Earlier last week, one patient had been referred in from their family physician, and the onsite senior resident, Adam, had been the doctor to assess them. Symptoms were vague — generally unwell, off food, bit of a cough, possible headache. Viral swabs were taken, because pretty much anyone that had lately walked through the hospital door with even a suspicion of sepsis now had samples sent off.
As an internal medicine resident working at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, COVID-19 has taken over our workroom conversations as the number of new cases enters exponential growth. As an anthropologist who lived in Wuhan for a year and has regularly kept in touch with physicians there since the city was placed under lockdown on January 23, 2020, COVID-19 has proved to be an unprecedented crisis.
As a program director, I am worried about my trainees who are already challenged with the usual stressors of graduate medical education (GME). This new illness is threatening to upend and disrupt our program in ways that I cannot even imagine, and therefore cannot plan for.
The other day at work, there were a few employees that were unnecessarily spreading panic on a message board by comparing the novel coronavirus COVID-19 to the infections mentioned in Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel — one commenter wrote that “every once in a while in history an infection comes along like this.”
Attending Physician Guest Author and Contributing Writer Emeritus
Intermountain Healthcare
Justin Jones is an outpatient primary care physician in Utah. He completed his residency in 2018 in Colorado and wrote for in-House during residency. He blogs at Residency Hacker.
