What your doctor reads on Medscape.com:
APRIL 8, 2020 – Heroes.
Frontliners.
Soldiers in surgical gowns.
According to the headlines, we’re currently in such a situation, the COVID-19 pandemic.
Friends, family, and even complete strangers are showering us with an outpouring of gratitude and appreciation through texts, phone calls, emails, memes, and tweets. Volunteer food trains are helping to deliver meals to hospital staff each day; sewing parties are helping to make up for the shortage of private protective equipment with homemade face masks; and as an emergency physician, I even have never seen my specialty receive more public recognition.
We are the darlings of the news media, but that doesn't necessarily apply to our personal lives.
Recently, as I used to be stopping at a gas station, a lady in surgical scrubs saw me, immediately pulled her shirt over her face, rushed past me, and said, “Thank you for what you're doing, but I don't want to get sick.”
This was a comparatively inconsequential interaction, however it got me pondering: On the strategy to becoming “heroes,” have we also grow to be social pariahs?
A colleague of mine is currently sleeping in a mobile home outside his house because his wife is afraid of being infected. His meals are delivered to him on a disinfected tray through a makeshift dog flap.
The idea of isolating “dirty” frontline fighters from their families is so popular that there may be even a Facebook group Motorhomes 4 MDswith over 16,000 members, designed help connect RVers with doctors who need alternative sleeping quarters.
Other doctors were banished to temporary accommodation like motels, Airbnbs, and even the capsule-sized emergency rooms of their hospitals.
A well known Emergency doctor traveled to New York to assist with the crisis, and after working his first shift on the devastated Bellevue Hospital, he found that he was not welcome in his brother's apartment where he was staying. Management had banned him from entering because they feared he might infect the constructing.
Doctors with children face much more complex challenges. A colleague of mine who has a newborn baby wears a ventilator at home on a regular basis, even when she sleeps.
Another woman said babysitters refused to come back to her home because they feared the coronavirus may very well be traced from the hospital. Neighbours and family friends who usually sorted her children at the moment are refusing, also out of fear that the kids of frontline fighters usually tend to be coronavirus carriers.
A father who’s a physician said that his ex-wife doesn’t allow him to see his own children because he fears the danger of infection within the hospital.
Another colleague, a single mother, is receiving calls from relations who’ve threatened to take her children away from her with a view to “save” them from infection. Working as a physician treating sick patients has at all times been dangerous, and not only in times of coronavirus. HIV, hepatitis, flu, tuberculosis, Clostridium difficileMRSA – these are only a few of the countless infectious diseases we’re exposed to during every shift.
As healthcare providers, we’re more aware than ever of the risks related to our work.
In today’s world almost every front-line fighter I do know that a type of post-shift “decontamination” has recently been introduced. Whether these rituals are to objectively disinfect, ease our consciences, or each, healthcare staff have each developed their very own protocols. For me, meaning entering the home through a side door, immediately stripping off my scrubs, and running through the home to the closest shower—hoping to my husband remembered to shut the blinds, or that my neighbors not less than have a humorousness.
As strange as it might sound, the cruel truth is that we not only have an obligation to treat patients and save lives, but in addition the burden of doubtless infecting our family members.
The risk of transmitting a deadly contagion in real life is real, and there is no such thing as a perfect solution to a sophisticated situation. While the world is proactively practicing distancing, I’m unsure now we have realized that it’s specifically us.
The headlines call us “heroes,” however it seems like we are able to only be heroes from a distance.
In a time of uncertainty, fear and tension, we want stability and support greater than ever to find a way to proceed our work. The difference between social distancing and total isolation is delicate. Our families will at all times come first for us and all we are able to ask of them is compassion and understanding.
Understanding that we never wanted to make a choice from family and profession, though it feels that way greater than ever today.
Understanding that although we don't at all times ask for it, sometimes we want help.
And crucial thing is to know that we’re doing our greatest – for ourselves, for our families and for our patients.
Amy Faith Ho, MD, is an emergency physician, published creator, and national speaker on health care and health policy issues. Her work has been featured in Forbes, Chicago Tribune, NPR, KevinMD, and TEDx.