Short Wave - Pandemic Dispatches From The ER, One Year Later

Episode Date: March 3, 2021

The coronavirus has disrupted all of our lives, and that's especially true for healthcare workers. We hear reflections from Dr. Jamila Goldsmith and Mariah Clark, two emergency room workers. They tell us what the first year of the pandemic has been like for them, how their lives have changed, and what's around the corner as more people become vaccinated. Are you a healthcare worker who would be willing to share your experience with the Short Wave team? Email us at [e-mail] pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. The coronavirus has disrupted all of our lives, and that's especially true for health care workers. Nurses and techs and doctors and hospitals, clinics, nursing homes. They were some of the first to see how bad it could really get, like Jamila Goldsmith, an emergency room physician in Georgia. I remember reading the stories about what was taking place in Italy. and I was scared to death, to be perfectly honest. It'll be a year ago next week that the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. Days later, a national emergency was declared here in the U.S.

For Mariah Clark, an EMT, an emergency nurse in Wisconsin, it was a year where everything was upended. And it felt like you were on a slippery, muddied. the hill and you could see how steep and how far that hill was and how many rocks and you could see the precipice at the bottom and you couldn't stop sliding. So today in the show, two emergency room health care workers reflect on what this last year has been like for them and just how much has changed in their work and lives. I'm Maddie Safaya and you're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Today we're handing over the show to two emergency room health care workers.

Jamila Goldsmith, an emergency room physician in Georgia, who found out she was pregnant last fall. And Mariah Clark, who works at a hospital in Wisconsin, she says even before the pandemic, every shift was busy. Since COVID hit, it's been interesting to see it change. We started out with it actually getting really slow. my hospital was canceling elective surgeries. We were discharging anyone who was stable to go home so that we could be ready for the expected surge. You know, we stopped having patients in hallways.

We stopped having hordes of patients in the waiting room on some days. You know, it was so much quieter and so much more solemn. And then it kind of eased back up a bit. And then, oh, October, November. and into December, that was a really bad time. We didn't know when the vaccines were coming. We didn't know when more PPE was coming, and it just felt eternal and heavy.

You know, I found out that I was pregnant in September before all the big waves when, like, Christmas, New Year, Thanksgiving, when all the holidays hit. And so that was a bit of an anxious time for me just because I had to consider not only myself, but the fact that I'm carrying a baby. So I have pretty much just figured out what to do to keep myself safe. And that includes like I purchased a respirator. I, of course, have a strict routine when I come in the house,

still stripping everything down, washing my clothes immediately, and, you know, just doing everything to make my family feel comfortable with me going in that environment and coming home. There's a patient. It was a four-month-old baby, presumed to have COVID, that I had to put on a ventilator, and being pregnant myself, having that experience, and this is before I got vaccinated, that was one of the things that stuck out in my mind. And so I was, I was a little bit of, say that, yeah, I have to try and figure out how to not carry that into my personal life. Sometimes cases like that stick with you. You never get that desensitized. But, you know, for the sake of everyone else, you hold on, you just keep it inside and you share and decompress

with other physicians who understand what the challenges are and can empathize with, you know, the cases that you see. I remember one elderly black woman who had medical conditions that meant she was immunocompromised, but she was also the primary breadwinner for her family. And so she'd been going to work, and she worked at a big box retail store. And she was not going anywhere else. She was having her groceries delivered. She was only staying at home, you know.

And she'd had organ transplant. and chemotherapy and like she had been through a lot medically over the years and I got to tell her her test results and she just collapsed in the bed just crumpled over sobbing I've been so careful I haven't gone anywhere I haven't done anything she was terrified that she was going to die She knew she was vulnerable and she was extra vulnerable because the pandemic has disproportionately affected black people and people of color. And I'm sitting here in a face shield and an N95 mask and a surgical mask and a cap and a gown and double gloves. I mean, she can see two inches of my face right across my eyes. And she's just sobbing into me because she swears she's never going to leave this hospital.

and both of us know that she might not. Being a African-American physician, recognizing just how much black and brown communities suffer from disease and lack of access to care, I think those were highlighted. And of course, I've always recognized these things, but I don't think that everyone recognize them. So I think that may have been a good thing

in terms of, bringing more recognition and shedding a light on that, because it's important as we move into vaccinating black and brown communities that we put more emphasis and effort in making sure that we do right by these communities moving forward. It's been interesting to see how my coworkers' attitudes have changed. In March, I think a whole bunch of us sat around, and anybody who didn't already have a medical power of attorney or an advanced directive filled them out. And a lot of my coworkers are, you know, young people in their 20s who've never really thought about that before.

Whereas now, we're all pretty used to it. Almost all of my coworkers got vaccinated when the vaccines started coming out in December. And that took a palpable weight out of the room. You know, a lot of us felt just a lot better after getting that. You know, we knew that there was still a risk. but it's like you've got a life preserver. You know, you may still be out there in the ocean waiting for, you know, rescue, but like you got something to hang on to now.

Initially, when the vaccine became available, you know, of course I thought it was an awesome thing that we'd have another layer of protection. So when I started seeing that there were pregnant women getting vaccinated, And I talked with my OB doctor who, of course, the advice is it's a personal decision, but in frontline workers who have high-risk jobs, which is me, that is recommended that I get it because the risk of getting COVID in pregnancy are much higher than the possibilities of risk, the low possibilities of risk with obtaining the vaccine.

And so I still wanted to put some thought into it, of course, trying to read every piece of data that's out there, which is not that much. So I was nervous, but every COVID patient that I went in the room, it was in the back of my mind, like, oh, my God, what if this is the patient that infects me? You know, I go in a room and I feel my baby kicking me, and I'm like, oh, my gosh, like, what if I put it? us in danger because I don't get this. And so I decided to go ahead and get the vaccine. I would say as a healthcare worker who has seen people losing their family members, people dying alone, that we have to be conscious of other people around us, older people around us, people who are vulnerable, we really have to show that we actually care for one

another and I think that is actually the most patriotic thing we can do right now is simply wear a mask, get vaccinated if you have access and you're eligible to do that now. Because we'll never get to that point if we don't start really consciously making sacrifices and thinking of others and not just ourselves. It feels more like eventually this will become. a bad disease, but a disease that we are accustomed to and can handle long term. You know, people are no longer terrified to go into a COVID patient's room. We just put on our isolation gear like we do for people who have any other disease we need to isolate for

and do our thing and clean up and come back out. And the feeling of the imminent overhanging shadow of death at the beginning to, to instead of being in darkness, being in twilight. And maybe, maybe the dawn is coming. I'm not actually an optimist, but it does feel cautiously hopeful. Huge, huge thank you to ER nurse, Mariah Clark, and ER physician Jamila Goldsmith,

for sharing their stories with us. If you are a healthcare worker or you know one who would be willing to share their experience with the Shortwave team, email us at Shortwave at NPR.org. This episode was produced and reported by Britt Hansen, fact-checked by Rasha Auredi and edited by Viet. The audio engineer for this episode was Josh Newell. I'm Maddie Safia. Thanks for listening to Shortwave, NPR's daily science podcast.

See you tomorrow.