‘I would come home with tears in my eyes’
Surveys show rising rates of depression, trauma and burnout
About 2 a.m. on a sweltering summer night, Dr. Orlando Garner awoke to the sound of a thud next to his baby daughter’s crib.
He leapt out of bed to find his wife, Gabriela, passed out, her forehead hot with the same fever that had stricken him and his son, Orlando Jr., then 3, just hours before. Two days later, it would hit their infant daughter.
Nearly five months later, Garner, a critical care physician at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, is haunted by what befell his family: He inadvertently had shuttled the coronavirus home, and sickened them all.
“I felt so guilty,” he said. “This is my job, what I wanted to do for a living. And it could have killed my children, could have killed my wife — all this, because of me.”
With the case count climbing again in Texas, Garner has recurring nightmares that one of his children has died from COVID. He’s returned to 80-hour weeks in the intensive care unit, donning layers of pandemic garb including goggles, an N95 respirator, a protective bodysuit and a helmet-like face shield that forces him to yell to be heard.
As he treats one patient after another, he can’t shake the fear that his first bout with the coronavirus won’t be his last, even though reinfection is rare: “Is this going to be the one who gives me COVID again?”
Frontline health care workers have been the one constant, the medical soldiers forming row after row in the ground war against the raging spread of the coronavirus. But as cases and deaths shatter daily records, foreshadowing one of the deadliest years in American history, the very people whose life mission is caring for others are on the verge of collective collapse.
Front-line worries
In interviews, more than two dozen frontline medical workers described the unrelenting stress that has become an endemic part of the health care crisis nationwide.
Many told of spikes in anxiety and depressive thoughts, as well as a chronic sense of hopelessness and deepening fatigue, spurred in part by the cavalier attitudes of many Americans who seem to have lost patience with the pandemic.
Surveys from around the globe have recorded rising rates of depression, trauma and burnout among a group of professionals already known for high rates of suicide. And while some have sought therapy or medications to cope, others fear that engaging in these support systems could blemish their records and dissuade future employers from hiring them.
“We’re sacrificing so much as health care providers — our health, our family’s health,” said Dr. Cleavon Gilman, an emergency medicine physician in Yuma, Ariz. “You would think that the country would have learned its lesson” after the spring, he said. “But I feel like the 20,000 people that died in New York died for nothing.”
Gilman’s first coronavirus tour began as a resident at New YorkPresbyterian at the height of last spring. He came to dread the phone calls to families unable to be near their ailing relatives, hearing “the same shrill cry, two or three times per shift,” he said.
Months of chaos, suffering and pain, he said, left him “just down and depressed and exhausted.”
“I would come home with tears in my eyes, and just pass out,” he said.
Many have reached the bottom of their reservoir, with little left to give, especially without sufficient tools to defend themselves against a disease that has killed more than 1,000 of them.
“I haven’t even thought about how I am today,” said Dr. Susannah Hills, a pediatric head and neck surgeon at Columbia University. “I can’t think of the last time somebody asked me that question.”
Dreading winter
For Dr. Shannon Tapia, a geriatrician in Colorado, April was bad. So was May. At one longterm care facility she staffed, 22 people died in 10 days.
“After that number, I stopped counting,” she said.
The evening of Nov. 17, Tapia fielded phone call after phone call from nursing homes brimming with the sick and the scared. Four patients died between 5 p.m. and 8 a.m.
“It was the most death pronouncements I’ve ever had to do in one night,” she said.
Before the pandemic, nursing home residents were already considered a medically neglected population. But the coronavirus has only exacerbated a worrisome chasm of care for older patients. Tapia is beleaguered by the helplessness she feels at every turn.
“Systematically, it makes me feel like I’m failing,” she said. “The last eight months almost broke me.”