Thanks, Health Heroes
Love in the Time of Corona—Days 15 + 16: Part One of a two-part miniseries on America’s healthcare workers, and how you can help them.
(Read Part Two—a guide for how to help—here.)
Last Monday was National Doctors’ Day. Tuesday was my father’s birthday. My father is a doctor.
My stepfather is a doctor, and so is my father’s girlfriend. My mother used to be a nurse. My sister is a nurse now.
You know how children of professional athletes “grow up in the clubhouse”? Well, I grew up in medicine — family medicine, to be specific. My entire life, I have had the privilege of knowing more medical professionals than a pharmaceutical sales rep, and I have been blessed to get to know them both as experts in their respective fields and as experts at navigating the intricacies of life. Not all people who work in healthcare are among the best of us in society — but a whole lot of them are.
The hashtag #ThanksHealthHeroes has been trending of late (and rightly so), because people are recognizing that healthcare workers are making and will continue to make giant sacrifices as they fight on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Still, I don’t know if most people truly understand the scope of what these healthcare workers are about to face, and just how amazing a collective sacrifice we are about to witness as a nation.
When I was first talking to my dad about how he was going to protect himself during this time, he wasn’t sure whether he’d have to keep seeing patients, or whether his office would go virtual.
“Dad,” I said to him, “you’re 66 years old. You’ve served your time in the trenches. Can’t someone else who’s younger and has a lower risk of serious illness do the hard yards right now?”
He looked at me (through the phone, and not on a Zoom call) in that way of his that always tells me he hears what I’m saying, but there’s no point in me saying it.
“What about the other docs on my team who are in their 30s and 40s?” he asked me. “And what about my 30-year-old nurse who has two children and is currently pregnant? Is my life more valuable than theirs?”
This points to the tip of the iceberg of ethical dilemmas healthcare professionals will need to consider in the coming months:
- If everyone is at risk, how do we determine whose risks take precedence?
- Who gets ventilators and life-saving treatments, and who doesn’t?
Not all medical staff will have to make these decisions during the crisis, but many will—and all will serve, in one way or another.
The doctors, nurses, techs and staff who battle on the hospital floors where COVID-19 is running amok? They’re standing on the medical equivalent of Omaha Beach.
In the coming weeks and months, a gushing river of disease and death is going to descend on just about every hospital in just about every city and every town in America. This river has already started to flow, but we are only beginning to appreciate the amount of flooding it is going to cause.
Our hospital workers are already running out of supplies. They are already running low on ventilators, at risk of running out of hospital beds, “protecting” themselves with makeshift masks and trashbag gowns and MacGyvered uniforms that probably offer no better resistance against this virus than a bulb of garlic dangling from a necklace.
This is going to go on for months. For weeks and weeks on end, healthcare workers are about to bust their asses, working 10-hour days before they even have their lunch breaks, followed by hours and hours of work after that. They will do this on little to no sleep, without being able to be close to their family members when they’re home, without being able to #quarantineandchill. They will do this day after day after day after day after day.
They will do it while bodies pile up around them. They will do it while people gasp for their last breaths like they’re drowning — because they are drowning, in fresh air — and they will do it while knowing that these drowning souls are alone, all alone, here at the end of all things.
They will watch all of this unfold, and far too many times they will be powerless to do anything but remember it. But remember it they will.
For the rest of their lives, this chapter in history will be etched into their brains, and it is fair to assume that many healthcare workers who live through this will experience symptoms of PTSD not unlike those of soldiers returning from war. Hospital workers are used to dealing with sickness and death, but not like this. Never like this.
And, lest we forget, everything I’ve described above is what will happen to these workers while they’re healthy. An overwhelming majority of those working the front lines are likely to catch this virus, and many of them will either become hospitalized or die in the very places where they work, or have to care for their coworkers who are hospitalized and dying.
And yet — they will keep showing up. They will fight this with everything they have, even when “everything they have” cannot remotely hope to be enough. They will do this because there is no one else to do it, because it is their calling, and because, above all, they give a damn.
Please join me in Supporting Our Healthcare Troops—because right now, we are not doing nearly enough to help.
I call them troops because this is a war effort. You know the way people feel about our military service personnel, and the level of respect and patriotism they have for our Americans in uniform? That’s how we should feel about our healthcare warriors.
We would never send American soldiers off to war without guns, tanks and the best military equipment the world’s biggest war chest can buy—and yet, we’re sending thousands upon thousands of healthcare workers into lethal combat zones with little more than BB guns and slingshots.
Our health heroes need our support, and contrary to what many believe, we are not powerless to help them.
In my next post, I share tangible, positive actions each of us can take to help health heroes fight this virus. Read it here.
Health Hero-related Recommended Reading:
Over the past few weeks, I’ve saved a large number of articles that illustrate what our healthcare workers are going through, the scope of the problem, and what we can expect in the weeks ahead. In addition to the New York Times and BuzzFeed News links shared above, here are some of the best of those articles.
Please RECOMMEND (clap) and SHARE this story, and always Keep It Movin.
Read other posts from the “Love in the Time of Corona” series by Sam Rosenthal:
- Love in the Time of Corona — Day 1
- Days 2 + 3, Purgatory
- Day 4, Powerless
- Days 5 + 6, On the Necessity of Everyday Heroism
- Days 7 + 8, Rose-Colored Realism
- Days 9 + 10, Stir Crazy
- Days 11–13, Turning the Corner?
- Day 14, A Down-and-Up Kinda’ Day
Read more of Sam Rosenthal’s work at samrose101.com, check out his #businesscardstories collection, follow him at @SamRoseWrites and stay tuned for his debut novel, Walking Backwards.
