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26 The College of New Jersey Magazine take that extra minute to try and en- gage the family, to make sure patients are not feeling alone. This summer, I became the program director of the Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency, which is where I actually did my residency. There's something about working with new doctors that's inspiring and brings me back to the fundamental core of why I went into medicine. To see their optimism and excitement for the future is invigorating. One of the things that's really hard in emergency medicine is there's a lot of burnout. I tell residents when they first start out, "You're going to see more tragedy, as well as awesomeness, in your first couple months than most people will see in their life." Looking forward, I think the passion and joy for me is about working with the next generation of physicians and being involved in helping to shape them as doctors. In the emergency room, you see everything — a spectrum of ages and disease, people who are homeless, people who don't have access to care so they come to us for a medication refill. You see people who are dying or having strokes or heart attacks. It's truly the entire spectrum of medicine and society. I think the pandemic has high- lighted the importance of emergency medicine and the people whose job it is to respond to a crisis. There's a huge amount of pride in who we are and what we do. We go to work and breathing machine. I was going to bring her into the room before we did — this was really early on, when family could still come inside — and let her talk to him. I didn't know if he was going to survive. He was younger so I was thinking maybe he would. But I didn't have the sense she was totally processing how bad this was. About 10 days later, I looked him up and saw that he had died. I thought, "Oh my gosh, I saw their last conver- sation." And I don't think it was how she ever imagined her last conversa- tion with her husband being. He was in so much distress that he barely said anything. I remember that case vividly. Not being sure what to tell her, not being able to predict what his course would be, and just being really shaken when he didn't make it. In the ER, we all are wondering when, and if, life will go back to nor- mal. Certainly, the recent surges and cases elsewhere in the country are making us all really anxious in this part of the country. We're still wearing masks all the time. We're getting badge-size pictures of our faces smiling because there's this loss of human connectedness when you can't actually see someone's facial emotions. When I walk into a room, I like to smile and laugh and shake hands and all of that's gone. And it would be really upsetting to me if that doesn't ever come back. We've talked a lot about the whole human piece of this and the attentive- ness and I think a lot of people were really affected by it. I think it's going to be on all of our radars in the future to "You're going to see more tragedy, as well as awesomeness, in your first couple months than most people will see in their life."

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