Gabrielle Dawn Luna sees her father in every patient she treats.
As an emergency nurse in the same hospital where her father died of Covid last year, I know. Luna first hand what it is like for a family to hang on to every new information. She is well aware of the need to take extra time to explain the developments to a patient’s family members who are often desperate for updates.
And Luna is willing to share her personal loss if it helps, as recently with a patient whose husband died. But she also learned to refrain from respecting everyone’s distinctive sadness, as when a colleague’s father also succumbed to the disease.
It is challenging, she said, to make herself sad enough to help patients without feeling overwhelmed.
“Sometimes I think it’s too much of a responsibility,” she said. “But that’s the job I signed up for, right?”
The Lunas are a nursing family. Her father, Tom Omaña Luna, was also an emergency nurse and was proud when Luna joined him in the field. When he passed away on April 9, Ms. Luna, who also had mild symptoms of Covid-19, took about a week off work. Her mother, a nurse at a long-term care facility, then spent about six weeks at home.
“She did not want me to go back to work for fear that something would happen to me as well,” she said. Luna said. ‘But I had to go back. They needed me. ‘
When her hospital in Teaneck, NJ swelled with virus patients, she struggled with tension, burnout and a nagging fear that left her sadness an open wound: ‘Did I give it to him? I do not want to think about it, but it’s a possibility. ‘
Like the Lunas, many who treat the millions of coronavirus patients in the United States in the past year come from families defined by medicine. It is a calling passed down through generations, one that binds spouses and binds brothers and sisters who have states apart.
It is a band that brings the support of shared experience, but for many, the pandemic has also caused a multitude of fears and tensions. Many are worried about the risks they are taking and also those who are facing their loved ones every day. They are worried about the unseen scars left behind.
And for those like me. Luna, the care they give to patients with coronavirus is shaped by the beloved healer who lost them to the virus.
By working grief
For Dr Nadia Zuabi, the loss is so new that she still refers to her father, a medical emergency department physician, at the present time.
Her father, dr. Shawki Zuabi, spent his last days in her hospital, UCI Health, in Orange County, California, before dying on January 8 of Covid. purpose and her colleagues ’camaraderie.
She expected that, along with the people who cared for her father, she would deepen her commitment to her own patients, and did so to some degree. But above all, she realized how important it is to balance the burden between emotional availability and her own well-being.
“I always try to be as empathetic and compassionate as I can,” said Dr. Zuabi said. “There’s a part of you that you might have to build a wall as a survival mechanism because I feel like it’s sustainable all the time.”
Work is filled with reminders. When she saw a patient’s fingertips, she remembered how her colleagues also pricked her dad to check insulin levels.
“He had all these bruises on his fingertips,” she said. “It just broke my heart.”
The two have always been close, but they found a special bond when she went to medical school. Doctors often come from doctors. About 20 percent in Sweden have parents with medical degrees, and researchers believe the rate in the United States is the same.
The older doctor Zuabi had a gift and loved talking to his daughter about medicine while sitting in his living room chair with his feet stuffed. She is still busy with her residency training, and during the past year she would consult him about the challenging Covid cases she was working on, and he would take away her doubts. “You have to trust yourself,” he would tell her.
When he contracted the virus, she took time to be at his bedside every day and continued their conversations. Even when he intubated, she pretended they were still talking.
She’s still doing it. After difficult shifts, she turns to her memories, the part of him that stays with her. “He really thought I was going to be a great doctor,” she said. “If my father thought it of me, it must be true. I can do it, even if it sometimes does not feel like it. ”
Love tempered by risk and horror
Just as medicine is often a passion that has grown from a set of values passed down from one generation to the next, it is also one shared by brothers and sisters and one that brings healers together in marriage.
About 14 percent of physicians in the United States have siblings who also earned medical degrees, according to an estimate by Maria Polyakova, a professor of health policy at Stanford University. And a fourth of them are married to another physician, according to a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
In interviews with a dozen doctors and nurses, they described how it has long been helpful to have a loved one who knows the difficulty of the job. But the pandemic also revealed how scary it can be to have a loved one bad.
A nurse’s brother cared for her when she had the virus before voluntarily going elsewhere for viruses. A doctor talked to her children about what would happen if she and her husband both died of the virus. And others described crying silently during a conversation about wills after putting their children to bed.
Dr. Fred E. Kency Jr., a physician at two emergency departments in Jackson, Miss., Understood that he was surrounded by danger while serving in the Navy. He never expected that he would experience such a threat in civilian life, or that his wife, an internist and pediatrician, would also experience the same dangers.
“It’s scary to know that my wife has to walk into patients’ rooms with Covid every day,” said Dr. Kency said before he and his wife were vaccinated. “But it’s rewarding to know that not just one of us, both of us, is doing everything in our power to save lives in this pandemic.”
The vaccine has alleviated fears of infection at work for vaccinated medical workers, but some express deep concern about the toll their immediate family has been working through a year of atrocities.
“I am concerned about the amount of suffering and death she is experiencing,” said Dr. Adesuwa I. Akhetuamhen, an emergency physician at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, spoke about her sister, who is a physician at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. “I feel it’s something I learned to tackle while working in the emergency department before Covid started, but it’s not something that’s supposed to happen in her specialty as a neurologist.”
She and her sister, dr. Eseosa T. Ighodaro, regularly talked on the phone to compare notes on the precautions they take, to update their family and to offer each other support. “She completely understands what I’m going through and gives me encouragement,” said Dr. Ighodaro said.
The seemingly endless intensity of work, the increasing number of deaths, and the cavalier attitude that some Americans show toward safety measures have caused an increasing number of health workers anxiety, fatigue, and burnout. Nearly 25 percent of them are likely to have PTSD, according to a survey published by the Yale School of Medicine in February. And many have left the field or are considering doing so.
Donna Quinn, a midwife at NYU Health in Manhattan, is worried that her son’s experience as a doctor in an emergency in Chicago will leave him to leave the field he recently joined. He was in his last year of residence when the pandemic began, and he volunteered in the intubation team.
“I’m worried about the toll it’s taking on him emotionally,” she said. “There have been nights where we talked in tears about what we encountered.”
She still has nightmares that are sometimes so frightening that she falls out of bed. Some are about her son or patients she can not help. In one, a patient’s bedding turns into a large monster that chases her out of the room.
The purpose of a nurse
When Luna returns to her emergency room at Holy Name Medical Center in Teaneck, NJ, for the first time, she feels like something is missing. She was used to having him there. It was nerve-wracking, because every urgent intercom call for a resuscitation made her wonder, “Is this my dad?” But she can at least stop every now and then to see how he is doing.
More than that, she never knew what it was like to be a nurse without him. She remembered him studying to enter the field when she was in elementary school, and coloring almost every line in his large textbooks with yellow illuminator.
During her breakfast in March last year, Luna told her father how shocked she was after holding an iPad for a dying patient to say goodbye to a family who could not get to the hospital.
“This is our profession,” she recalled. Luna. “We are here to act as a family when family cannot be there. This is a difficult role. It’s going to be tough, and there will be more times you’ll have to do it. ”
Kitty Bennett contributed research.