Doctors and nurses in the fight against Covid are suffering combat fatigue
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, Veronica.
Nearly five months later, Dr. Garner, a critical care physician at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, is haunted by what befell his family last summer: He had inadvertently 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, Dr. 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 body suit 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.
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 related 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. [Continue reading…]