Mount Sinai doctor helps Miami Beach; Cleveland Clinic trio goes to Abu Dhabi
When Dr. Ari Ciment, a pulmonologist and critical care physician at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach, got an alert on his phone that a rare infectious disease had appeared in Wuhan, China, he immediately acted.
He organized a Zoom call with an ICU director in Wuhan and within a few hours, they had about 50 ICU pulmonary, critical care and infectious disease doctors joining.
“I like to be proactive,” said Ciment. “I reached out to Chinese hospitals, calling them up and saying, ‘What’s helping you, what are you doing?’ What I found out was that I don’t speak Chinese.”
But through Englishspeaking residents, Ciment found key information, including the severity of the disease, the potential risks of intubation, and what the treatment options were for what became known as COVID-19.
CONSULTED WITH MIAMI BEACH MAYOR
Among those listening to Ciment’s findings was his friend, Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber.
“In February and March, he was telling us that we needed to prepare for a storm of infections,” Gelber said.
“He was convinced, unquestionably, this was coming our way, and I took his advice.”
Ciment continued to communicate with Gelber throughout the pandemic. As a result, Miami Beach was one of the first cities in South Florida to implement a mask mandate, set up testing sites, and later on, rent the freezers necessary to store the vaccines.
“[Dr. Ari] has been absolutely awesome, not simply in his work as a clinician, but really in the community telling people what they need to be doing, promoting healthy practices, and really being a voice of informed reason,” Gelber said.
Ciment also has served on an advisory committee for the Hebrew Academy in Miami Beach, which goes from preschool to 12th grade, and taught the Orthodox Jewish Nurses Association about vaccines, protocols and medical ethics related to COVID-19.
At the start of the pandemic, members of his synagogue traveled to a convention in New Rochelle, where he knew one of the first COVID-19 infectees in the country had been.
He also knew the group was coming back to attend Shabbat, the gathering that begins on sundown Friday to celebrate the Sabbath.
“Literally one minute before the Shabbat, I called the local rabbi and I said, ‘You got to do something; you got to shut down the synagogue because these guys are coming and they were exposed,’” he said.
The rabbi did not agree at first, but after Ciment went to his house to discuss it, he asked those who had been at the conference not to come to synagogue.
“Before anybody knew to shut down stuff you were ostracized,” he said. “Initially, you really had to be aggressive about your preventative measures, and with that came a lot of resistance, unfortunately. But actually, all those people that were critical, at some point came to me for advice about their family members who were hit by or struck by some form or manifestation of the disease.”
CLEVELAND CLINIC TRIO GOES TO UAE
Dr. James Roach, chairman of the emergency department at Cleveland Clinic Florida and chief medical officer for the Broward Sheriff’s Office, learned firsthand about COVID.
Like more than 60,000 healthcare workers who got infected around the country, Roach contracted COVID, getting pneumonia and fatigue in the middle of March. He quarantined in his house for three weeks and returned to the hospital after testing negative.
“When I was sick, I was thinking to myself: If I ever heal and get out of this, and I can help anybody, I really want to be able to do that,” he said.
About two weeks after returning to the hospital, he got his chance. At the end of April, he received a request to go to the Cleveland Clinic in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East, where many caregivers had been infected and others were overwhelmed with the workload.
Roach, along with two nurses from the Weston hospital, Oriana Ordosgoitti, R.N., and Lindsay Hindsman, R.N., spent six weeks working there.
“They were exhausted from working nonstop, setting up tents to test and treat COVID patients at the beginning of the pandemic,” Roach said.
He also worked in the medical Intensive Care Unit intubating COIVD-19 patients who had to be placed on a ventilator.
“All the ICU beds were full when I arrived,” Roach said. “By the time I left, things were under control and the number of patients in the ICU decreased.”
Soon after he came back, his 81-year-old mother, who lives in Illinois, got infected with COVID-19, but the hospital where she was treated did not have the equipment for optimal treatment.
So, he flew her in an air ambulance on a ventilator to the Cleveland Clinic, where she was intubated for five weeks and discharged in December.
She got off oxygen last month and will be heading back to Illinois in a few weeks.
Roach experienced an emotional toll similar to Ciment of Mount Sinai had.
“It’s not just medical people, but your whole world, where everybody you encounter is facing this, and it creates such challenges, both from a medical and emotional standpoint,” he said.
“You have a team here of nurses, paramedics and doctors that I would consider to be heroes. It’s really been really humbling, and it’s been an honor to see the men and women that I work with, how brave they are, and how committed they are to medicine and taking care of patients.”