TCNJ

25 FALL 2020 my father did — and it's just one of those things I've really tried to focus on. I have to break bad news not only about death, but also about a diagno- sis someone isn't expecting. How do you do that and provide compassion? There's that piece of forgetting the doctor thing, forgetting the white coat thing, and just being another human being. I had been working in emergency medicine in New York City for 14 years. It hit me that something bad was happening when we started to hear about COVID-19 cases on the West Coast. When I saw the uptick in New Rochelle, just outside New York, that was the moment that I was like, "It's here. Are we ready?" All of sudden, it was a tsunami. There were all these patients and ev- erybody coming in with symptoms that seemed like they might have it, and we were realizing it was so wide- spread we had to assume everybody had it. Overnight, our world changed. In the beginning, there was a lot of fear and anxiety. "What's happening? Am I going to get sick? Are my col- leagues going to get sick?" There were so many questions. There was also this sense of pride for our specialty. This is what we do. We respond to disasters. We mobilize and we just go with it. But this was a whole new world. Everyone kept saying, "This is a sustained mass casualty incident." We were wearing masks and goggles and protecting ourselves from every single patient. When you walked through the ER, everyone had acute heart failure. We left our house with a little blue flashing light on the car, and then got the ambulance. My heart was just racing. I saw all these medical procedures and we took the person to the hospital and it was this huge high. That was probably a pivot- al moment for me in realizing this is what I wanted to do with my life. an oxygen mask on. We had recliner chairs all along the hallway with people who were on oxygen. There were a ton of people on ventilators. We didn't have anybody who was there with belly pain. They just disappeared. It was the strangest thing in the world. I remember I sent out a tweet in the beginning, "Where have all the gallbladders gone?" I just wanted a gallbladder. Everybody was there for COVID. It was crazy. There were a ton of phone calls. Before the pandemic, families were there and it was helpful, but now, with literally no visitors, people were call- ing nonstop. We had this really in- creased level of awareness that we had to make sure families felt like they could talk to and hear from us. I would do my best to have these conversa- tions, even just for updates. When I could tell them I knew who their family member was, that they weren't an anonymous patient alone in a corner, that I was taking care of them, there was always this huge, palpable sense of relief. The hardest thing was not being able to answer people's questions well. Normally, you know what's go- ing on with someone. I've got years of experience in dealing with certain diseases and can realistically tell fam- ilies what's going to happen. This was the new unknown and it was so hard to be able to give people any kind of reassurance. I had a younger patient whom we had to put on a ventilator. I called his wife and was trying to convey the message that he was really, really sick and that we needed to put him on a Dan Egan and his mother, Noreen. There was this moment about five years into my career when my father got sick and I experienced medicine from the other side, as a family member. His disease spread and they were going to stop treatment. At that appointment, it felt like there was no holding his hand, just this impersonal, robotic speech: "Mr. Egan, the cancer is going to take your life." I was so angry. I realized we have to bring in the human piece of medicine more. People relive those moments over and over in their heads — I know

• Cover