Q: Can you describe your current employment?
A: I am an infectious disease physician. So, I’m board-certified in internal medicine and infectious disease. Currently, I work for Optum, which is like a managed care group, and I work as a hospitalist primarily at Providence Holycross Hospital.
Q: How was your workplace and medical specialty affected by COVID-19?
A: Well, clinically, I only work on the inpatient side, so we were affected pretty dramatically, at least back in the winter. We take care of patients that are admitted to the hospital, so when everything happened, initially everything kind of got locked down, and we had restricted visitors and policies and things like that. And we were seeing a smattering of cases here and there. But then, in the summer we started to see a spike in patients, and then in the winter, we saw a lot of patients that had COVID-19. So, I mean, really, what was affected was that I just saw a lot of really sick COVID-19 patients.
Q: Was there a particular patient or day or week that stays with you? Or was there something that scared or frightened or angered you during the first few months?
A: You know, I can’t really think of a specific patient, or even a week. The winter was really bad. I mean, there was a point where, I think, more than 70 percent of our patients were COVID patients. So, for a disease that didn’t exist to suddenly be 70 percent of your patients—that’s a lot. But I can’t think of a specific incident, honestly.
Q: How were you or your family personally impacted by COVID-19? Did you have a particular routine that you created or followed to de-stress or detach yourself from what you were seeing?
A: I guess the only thing I did was I just started focusing more on exercising, because there was nothing else to do? Otherwise, we were affected the same way everyone else was, which was that we couldn’t travel, we couldn’t see our family—even our family that was nearby—for a very long time.
Q: How have things progressed in the last few months? Are you receiving fewer patients with COVID-19?
A: Yeah, the numbers are significantly lower than they were before, basically since the end of January and February. Now, we just kind of see patients intermittently. It’s not like we have a regular influx of patients coming in.
Q: What are your hopes for a post-pandemic world?
A: To get back to some sense of normalcy? To be able to travel and see family again regularly, without the big risk of getting infected, I guess?
Q: Is there anything you want future generations or future doctors to know about handling another pandemic?
A: I think, for future generations, just understanding that when something like this happens, you’re not alone, you’re not isolated. Everything you’re doing to protect yourself is helping to protect part of the community too. So, we need to keep that in mind when there’s restrictions being placed on what you’re able to do. It’s not just you that it’s affecting—it’s also your community. A lot of the things we were seeing was because a lot of people weren’t observing the recommendations. So then they were getting exposed and they were getting infected and some of them were getting really sick and a lot of them were dying.
Q: Are you planning to continue with your field?
A: Yeah. I’m not going to be retiring anytime soon, so yeah. I’ll be continuing to work in infectious disease and in the hospital, and we’ll just go from there.