CALL OF DUTY
These selfless medical workers tirelessly pulled New Yorkers through in the face of COVID
THIS year more than ever, health professionals stepped up, literally putting their lives on the line to get us through the COVID crisis. Here are some of their inspiring stories.
Britni Hebert
When the pandemic was surging in the city last April, Hebert, an internal medicine doctor, had relatively few patients at her practice in Lafayette, La. She felt compelled to come and help. “Just watching the horror unfold in New York, it got to where I couldn’t sleep at night,” she said. “It felt like I was being called.” Hebert saw a post about a field hospital in New York City that was in need of doctors. She and her husband, a fellow physician, quickly made arrangements so that she could fill it. That meant leaving her three children, including her 18-month-old baby who was still breastfeeding, behind.
“It was just heartbreak on repeat,” she said, tearily. “When we tried to FaceTime, he would just throw fits.”
Working 12-hour shifts in the temporary hospital, Hebert says she was inspired by the amazing people and appreciative patients — although was sometimes frustrated by a lack of resources, like CT scanners and labs. Upon returning home to Louisiana, she and her husband both contracted COVID from a child-care provider. Hebert ended up getting seriously ill and catching pneumonia, and is still feeling the after-effects months later. Now, she’s excited about the vaccine, but Hebert urges people to remain vigilant about wearing masks and keeping to a small bubble. “We are entering the second half of this game,” she said, “and it’s the half we’re going to start winning.”
Anjoinette Minors
This 36-year-old doctor was one of three obstetrician/gynecologists at Jacobi Medical Center in The Bronx who volunteered to redeploy to internal medicine to care for COVID-19 patients in April.
“We were willing and able,” she said. “I felt a very strong pull to do what we could.”
Minors had some initial trepidation in changing specialties and dealing with a relatively unknown disease, but was also confident in her training.
“As an OB/GYN, you’re a primary care physician, and you know a lot of medicine,” she said.
Still, working in the hospital’s surge unit involved witnessing a lot more death and illness than her usual rotation. “Seeing people die that quickly was very hard,” said the New Jersey resident. “There are a few patients that I still think about on a regular basis.”
Minors recalls a man in his 70s who was dying in front of her, alone.
“I spent that day and the time that I could just praying with him and spending some time with him as he was taking his last breaths,” Minors said. “That stays with me.”
Whenever she lost a patient, Minors made sure she and her colleagues took a moment to acknowledge their life and death and think about their story. Otherwise, “you can get immune,” she said. “I think that was such an important thing to teach.”
Later in the fall, both Minors and her husband contracted the virus themselves but, thankfully, their 23month-old son did not get sick.
“I just have a new lens on it all,” said Minors. “I just imagine people who are at home [and very sick] but don’t have anyone to help them.”
While her hospital currently has few COVID patients, the obstetrician says she is ready and willing should she be needed to step in again.
“I would do it without any hesitation,” she says. “[Despite] all of the grief and all of the challenges, it really was a positive experience of my life.”
Sarah Buckley
Buckley, a nurse practitioner at NYU Langone, worked late one night to take a picture of the sun going down from the room of one of her patients, a man in his 30s who was on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), a type of life support, for several months. The man’s wife had requested the sunset picture, and Buckley was happy to oblige. “We did try and take the extra moments,” said the 37year-old. Afternoon phone calls updating the family members of her patients, all of whom were sedated, was “the hardest part of the day, but also the most meaningful,” she said. Buckley got her start in medicine as a volunteer EMT, spurred in part by her father’s life — he was an NYPD officer who was killed in the line of duty when she was an infant.
“I was inspired to do that after learning about his injuries and how we could do better,” said the Upper West Sider.
The sunset photo patient ultimately survived, and Buckley said she’s happy with the care she’s been able to provide. “I’m proud of our city, and proud of our profession.”
Julie Le
During the spring surge, the surgical ICU at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center turned into a COVID unit, and Le and her colleagues had to adjust to working with patients who are slower to recover than the post-op people they typically care for.
“We’re so used to quick results, especially in surgery. These [COVID] patients take at least a week to show some sort of sign of recovery,” said the 32-year-old physician assistant, who lives in Manhattan. “I had to remind everyone, ‘These patients need time to rest their lungs,’ ”
Going into the holiday season, she urged New Yorkers to remain safe and vigilant.
“Your actions affect everyone. People don’t see the war zone that’s happening in the hospital,” she said. “When you’re in the trenches, you see people going down, you see other families suffering”
Lisa Hoffman
As a respiratory therapist at NYU Langone, Hoffman is a key — but lesser known — health-care provider in the fight against the pandemic. She focuses on the implementation and management of respiratory devices such as ventilators.
“Our service is an integral and essential part of the daily war waged against this unprecedented pandemic,” said the 31year-old, who was inspired to go into the field after working at a camp for children with respiratory issues in her teenage years.
Her unit typically oversees 30 to 40 patients on ventilators, but, during the spring surge, they had over 200.
“It’s really challenging. Every day, we have to deal with life and death,” she said.
Caring for patients when no visitors are allowed has been especially hard.
“It makes you really want to connect with the patients, because you know that their family can’t be there to visit them,” she said. “You feel responsible for them.”
The pandemic has hit close to home for the Midtown resident: Her grandmother passed away from the virus in November.
“It’s just a lot to handle and think about,” she said. “I hadn’t seen her since COVID started.” She says she and her colleagues are “exhausted” by the work but continue to push on.
“It’s been a long, tough fight, but isn’t over yet. We keep going,” she said. “It’s so rewarding to see these COVID patients come out fighting and get better.”
Michael Colabraro
A nurse anesthetist at Lenox Hill Hospital on the Upper East Side, Colabraro is typically the final person a patient speaks to before they are intubated and put on a ventilator — and possibly ever.
“I try to make them feel as comfortable and safe as possible,” he said. “I know that could be the last thing they remember.”
One of the most challenging parts of caring for COVID patients, Colabraro says, has been not knowing very much about the disease and how to treat it, especially in the early days.
“The way we treat people is evidence-based medicine,” said the 37year-old who lives in Midtown East. “If somebody comes in with a heart attack, we know we do A, B and C, because that’s proven to work.”
But with COVID, they weren’t able to rely on such tactics. He’s frustrated that the initial response didn’t quell the pandemic better and earlier through testing and masking, but hopeful for what we will ultimately learn from this moment in history. “We can see how different countries, different cultures handled the response, and what the outcome was,” he said. “We can apply that to the next pandemic, and that’s going to be tremendously helpful.” Colabraro was helped by the camaraderie of his fellow medical care providers and the 7 p.m. call, which really helped him get through the spring surge. “That was really, really awesome. It reminded me of after 9/11, everyone was so patriotic and cohesive. It gave me that feeling. That really helped.”
Paul Boerem
One of the first COVID cases in New York City sprung up in early March, when a Westchester man was transferred to Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Boerem, a nurse practitioner in pulmonary and critical care, was on the team tending to him.
“He was on the ventilator for a couple weeks,” he said. The man recovered, and in the months that followed, Boerem cared for scores of COVID patients. At St. John’s Riverside, a smaller hospital in Yonkers where he also works, they were especially overwhelmed.
“You might usually lose five or six patients a month,” he said. “We were losing five or six a night. I can only imagine people who have gone to war. You have to show up every day and you’re not sure what’s coming. And you’re under threat yourself.” The 44-year-old has specialized in respiratory diseases for his whole career, but this one, he says, is truly unique. “It’s a longer, more insidious disease,” he said. “People will be on a ventilator or ECMO for months. You know every time you get one of these patients, you’re in for this long, hard slog of a fight.”