‘I thought I was invincible’: ER doctor
Losing sense of smell was what finally got him thinking he might have contracted virus
It was the cherry blossoms that finally tipped Dr. Joseph Finkler over the edge. It was springtime in Vancouver. They were blooming outside his house and he couldn’t smell them.
Finkler had been tired for days, exhausted even.
But that wasn’t that unusual on its own.
He’d been working nights in the emergency room at St. Paul’s Hospital.
He was coughing, too. But he’d been coughing for months. So at first, that didn’t worry him either.
“It got a little worse,” he said.
“So what? I was sure I had caught somebody’s cold.”
In retrospect, after it all clicked into place, Finkler remembered thinking, on that last shift, that the ER didn’t stink.
“Normally it smells like an industrial cleanser or it smells awful from people’s excretions and stuff,” he said.
But he was wearing a mask much more than usual, so that, too, didn’t stick out for him. He figured he’d go home, get some rest, have a cup of tea, and he’d be fine.
But at home, in bed after his shift, Finkler’s fever spiked. He soaked through his sheets and when he woke up and went outside, he couldn’t smell the trees.
“There’s a distinct, nice, fresh odour,” he said.
“And I realized — God, I can’t smell anything.”
That day, in late March, Finkler was swabbed for COVID-19.
His test came back positive. He’s been at home ever since, in isolation with his wife and two daughters.
Finkler’s story is a test case for how easy it can be to miss a case of COVID-19, even if you’re professionally trained to look for it.
It’s also a reminder of the risks health-care professionals are taking right now.
Finkler was lucky, all things considered.
By last Thursday, he was feeling better. Within a couple of weeks, he should be back to work.
But he still contracted the virus, despite all the precautions he and his organization have in place.
Finkler spoke to Postmedia last Friday about his diagnosis, the reaction from his friends and neighbours, and how he’s feeling now.
ON HIS SYMPTOMS
It’s definitely humbling, that’s for sure. I didn’t get very sick. I mean, I felt crummy and all that sort of stuff, but I didn’t need to go to the hospital to get oxygen.
I’d be walking dead before I go to the hospital, because even though I work there, I hate that stuff.
I never want to be a patient. No way.
I don’t know exactly when I got sick.
It was probably a day or two before my last shift, but it’s also possible it was after my last shift.
But it really crept up on me because I had a background of chronic cough.
I sort of thought I was invincible from this thing. Like, how is it going to get me?
I was just a duck — so easy to pick off. I don’t think I got it from a patient. I went back and checked all my swabs and they were all negative. But that doesn’t mean I was swabbing everybody.
I might have got it from a surface. I might’ve got it in the community, from touching a gas pump, a shelf in a grocery store, locking up my bike.
ON HIS TEST
I didn’t want to go to an emergency department.
I felt that if I was COVID-positive, I did not want to go in there and put healthcare providers, the people I work with, at risk and any of the patients at risk.
I went to a pop-up testing site for health-care workers behind one of the long-termcare facilities in Vancouver.
I got tested at 1:30 on the Friday and I figured I’d get the result by 4 p.m. at the latest on the Saturday.
And then at 4 p.m. nothing came, at 5 p.m. nothing came.
And then at 5:30, I got a phone call and it’s from public health and they’re not telling me I won the lottery.
ON THE REACTION OF HIS FRIENDS AND NEIGHBOURS
I’m so impressed at the number of colleagues and friends or vague contacts from the past — people I went to high school with — who have contacted me. It’s quite nice.
But there were other things that were not so nice. Some of our neighbours sent really harsh and mean bits of information to my wife. One neighbour said, “I just want to be clear: Your husband’s COVID-positive, so none of you people are going to be seen out of the house, right?” Like, are you watching us with night-vision goggles?
We decided to redo our wills (after the diagnosis). And so we did that online, and we just needed someone to witness it. My wife phoned one of the neighbours and asked them.
She said, ‘We’ll just leave our will on our porch and you can bring your own pen, you can sign it. They wouldn’t even respond. They were flabbergasted. They just hung up the phone.
So we became pariahs in our neighbourhood to some extent.
And I was sort of shocked by that.
ON THE GOOD COMING OUT OF THIS
At 5:30, I got a phone call and it’s from public health and they’re not telling me I won the lottery.”
Joseph Finkler
People are doing amazing stuff in our organization and all over the world. Our senior leadership is up late at night, early in the morning, planning, meeting, thinking: How can we rearrange? How can we increase our capacity? What’s our surge? What’s our flex? Some people are doing all this sort of stuff on their own time and their own dime.
So I think what this is showing me is that pandemics can bring out the worst in people — and that’s the hoarders and the resellers for Lysol and toilet paper and hand sanitizers — but can also bring out the best in people too.
It’s pretty amazing.