Helping The Healer

The pandemic has taken a toll on everyone, more so on health care workers. There have been increasing cases of burnout and mental health issues among the medical staff. What does it mean to take care of oneself even as one is in charge of the well-being of others?

- Dr Jame Abraham/Cleveland

In April 2020, Dr Lorna M. Breen, 49, an emergency room physician at New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital in upper Manhattan, called her sister Jennifer Feist, who lives in Virginia. As per a July 11, 2020, article in The New York Times, Breen was an overachiever in every level of her career, and was managing one of the busiest emergency rooms in New York City. That week in April, New York reported the highest number of fatalities from Covid-19. Large hospital systems and emergency rooms were overrun by patients seeking help with severe infection, low oxygen levels and high fever. The emergency department Breen had been managing was not an exception.

Doctors and nurses were asked to make decisions about who will get a ventilator or an ICU bed, which amounts to decisions about who will live and who will die. The death and suffering they witnessed during the tsunami of this pandemic was unimaginable. In addition, there was confusion about the management of Covid-19, its complications and the lack of specific treatments or PPE to protect themselves from the infection.

Breen did not know where to turn and she called Jennifer, who picked her up from New York City and helped to get her admitted to an inpatient psychiatric ward at University of Virginia Medical Center. In a few weeks, she was discharged and was staying with her mother. On April 26, Breen took her own life.