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Reflections of a Doctor Mom during the Pandemic

In April 2020, the death toll from SARS-CoV-2 reached its peak in New York City, claiming more than five hundred lives daily. Shops and restaurants shut down, schools went online, and essential businesses operated under tight social distancing regulations. The sick flooded hospitals, many of whom succumbed, quickly filling up those ominous overflow morgue trucks outside of buildings. The city saw fear, heard terror, and smelled death. 

 

All of us woke up every day to this terrifying reality. Families protected their children and elderly grandparents. Neighbors dropped off essential items to those who could not go outside. As for me and my colleagues, we pressed on as physicians with a new weight placed on our shoulders. 

   

During Holy Week, instead of meditating on the passion and attending services, I spent extended hours keeping up with a dizzying whirlwind of pandemic updates from the department of health and our hospital system, creating and implementing strategies to maintain our clinic in full operation, and checking on the physical and mental health of our nearly one hundred medical residents who had been redeployed to COVID units since mid-March, some of whom had contracted the disease themselves. At home, I spent late nights preparing food to store for the following week for my husband, a professor, and my Seventh Grade daughter, whose lives had been taken over by online schooling. Afterwards, I packed my duffle bag with scrubs and extra N95 masks that my brother and other friends procured for me during the notorious personal protective equipment shortage. 

 

I do not recall what my family specifically prayed for on Easter Sunday, the day before my redeployment to a COVID unit. It was a mixture of lament, fear, and a cautious hope that the situation could, against all odds, improve, because we could not imagine it getting any worse. In my burdened and distracted mind, I could only hold on to one verse which I had highlighted every Easter: “But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away.” (Mark 16:4)

     

That week turned out to be the peak of New York City’s pandemic curve. How easy it could have been to be overtaken with anger, fear, and pessimism that might have interfered with my ability to focus on my patients. Instead, our Father loved me and protected me against my own flesh. He showed me that He goes before His people and remains with them and that He will never leave or forsake them (Deut. 31:8). I was surprised by peace as I led my first team rounds.   

 

At first, I felt only my own insignificance, as I faced twenty patients directly under my care. But he soon let me catch a glimpse of that loving power that once rolled the stone away. The nation had begun to move: the arrival of the U.S. Naval Hospital Ship Comfort, the transformation of the Javits Center into a temporary hospital, the pitching of the field hospital of Samaritan’s Purse, and the support of New Yorkers with their 7PM cheers. Our friends and their friends encouraged our medical teams with meals, care packages, and messages as though they were the angel who touched Elijah and said to him “Get up and eat” in his darkest moment (1 Kings 19). 

     

With new strength, our hospital teams worked at their own peril to keep patients alive. Our doctors and nurses did more than open up breathing tubes, increase oxygen, or give medications to our patients. Many were seen holding patients’ hands or praying with them regardless of their religious affiliations. Some placed their own cell phones to the ears of dying patients so that their distraught families could recite their final prayers. 

 

At the end of long shifts, some made more phone calls, expending the last reserves of their mental and physical energy to report to family members who had been anxiously waiting all day to find out the fate of their loved ones. In all these scenes, I believed I could see Isaiah 33 come alive in its entirety to me. He has already shown us that calamities will come, yet our “eyes will see the king in his beauty” as we ponder “the former terror.”  Knowing that he defeated a much greater terror, and rolled away a much heavier stone, I saw the Great Physician in charge. 

    

How was I able to come to the place where peace reigned in my heart against all my human inclinations? I wish I could say that I prayed a good and mighty prayer every day. I didn’t. I couldn’t, beyond repeating “kyrie” as though it were a mantra. I knew for a fact that my family was praying; my daughter’s class, Geneva School families, our home church, and the nation. I did not work to attain a sense of peace, nor did I ask for it. It was given to me as a gift so I could help my patients, my team, and myself. On this island amid a sea of disease, I ended my redeployment week miraculously with zero death cases in my unit. God knew the depth of my skepticism better than I did and gave me this sign as a seal to remind me that he had been in charge all along. 

    

As of July, our hospital—which had surpassed its capacity at one point with nothing but COVID cases—now has fewer than a handful of infected patients. The city is celebrating this remarkable recovery with new beginnings; nonetheless, the ravages of the viral warfare has left many people with varying degrees of post-traumatic stress, depression, and burn-out, even if they had never been infected with the virus themselves. I wish I could say that there is nothing to worry about, but suffering still exists, and the path to full recovery still lies in the future. But God reminds us that he is with us through peaks, valleys, and everything in between. He is God Immanuel, the resurrected Lord, and the Great Physician. 

   

Published in Geneva School of Manhattan Journal, July, 2020