Up, close and personal with Manoj Dalmia - pediatric and adult anesthesiologist from NYC. He is real, honest, passionate and unapologetically himself, but embraces his vulnerability as his dominant strength. In this episode, Manoj shares with us, some of his deepest and most touching experiences from treating COVID patients. I could not help but tear up. He has also meticulously chronicled his daily experiences at the hospital during the lockdown on his FaceBook page. You can read more on his FB page.
Up, close and personal with Manoj Dalmia - pediatric and adult anesthesiologist from NYC. He is real, honest, passionate and unapologetically himself, but embraces his vulnerability as his dominant strength. In this episode, Manoj shares with us, some of his deepest and most touching experiences from treating COVID patients. I could not help but tear up. He has also meticulously chronicled his daily experiences at the hospital during the lockdown on his FaceBook page. You can read more on his FB page.
Hello and welcome to heroes of New York, a podcast about everyday heroes who have refused to let the pandemic stop them from serving others. In every episode, I will introduce to you someone who has risen above the odds to uplift people around them. I'm your host and Athena.
Unknown Speaker :Hi, Manoj. Welcome to the show.
Unknown Speaker :Hey, Andrew, how are you?
Unknown Speaker :Good. It's been, I think, a few days since we spoke last. And a lot has changed since then. Yeah, of course. You know, we were talking about the COVID crisis. And here we are in the midst of riots, and protests. And the reason we're talking is because of the work that you've been doing during the crisis working in hospital handling, patients who are coming in with COVID and now we are in June, so it's kind of tapering off. The numbers are coming down for the better. Looking back. How do you feel?
Unknown Speaker :I mean, I think just looking back, it was The most humbling time of my career as a physician, just as a little bit that a little background I've, so I've been in attending for the last eight years. And this was definitively the most humbling moment of my life, you really have to learn from me, I had to utilize every skill set of my knowledge that I had to be able to help take care of these patients. And these patients were really, really sick. We're used to, we're used to taking care of sick patients, but we're not used to taking care of numerous sick patients all at once, in this type of degree trauma. You know, again, when there's a trauma, it's generally relatively limited. But this was a constant influx of super sick patients, over a period of two to three weeks, essentially non stop. And it was really, really humbling, to say the least.
Unknown Speaker :Yeah, so many healthcare workers like you were going to hospitals and working at a time where people were suffering had to come in.
Unknown Speaker :Right?
Unknown Speaker :The hospital became a scary place to go. Don't go there unless you're really really sick. How did that feel? How did you guys hustle or scramble to meet the demands of this crisis?
Unknown Speaker :Well, the thing is the biggest the biggest people that that contributed to in terms of resources, were all your surgeons and your anesthesiologist, we played probably the biggest role. Specifically, I would say the anesthesiologist because we have a really unique skill set to be able to handle crises as they're as they kind of get created, like in our operating room. So because we cancelled all of our elective surgeries, we essentially ended up canceling even urgent, urgent surgeries and we only were doing emergent surgeries. We had well over I think 200 anesthesia staff, that now we're free to actually get redistributed and play different roles. So we had we had a group of anesthesiologists that functioned as extensions of ICU attendings. And that was my role. We had a number of anesthesiologists that were part of what we call her a VPP. Team, which is airway ventilate. ventilator is prone prone team as well. We had people that were that were sent over to Bellevue, because Bellevue is also an affiliate, that we're taking care of patients there. So we were all functioning in different roles and getting distributed based on where there was the most need
Unknown Speaker :go to. And I know you put a lot of posts on Facebook, you've been chronicling COVID very meticulously, and it's been a great source of information. I was reading through a few of those posts, and I see that you also tend to be very emotional, it is natural, right? Everyone sees healthcare workers putting their life at risk to help others but you have a family of your own. You have your own challenges, and there's a lot of stress involved. How did it feel
Unknown Speaker :I've always been really nice. I won't say I've always been. But I would say that probably over the last 10 years, I've developed really, really extensive coping mechanisms that weren't that aren't just from doing medicine, but just in life in general in terms of mindfulness. And and I think that it those those coping mechanisms really helped me a lot while I was taking care of these patients. So, for me, the big The reason that I wrote all those posts, and like you said that it was very emotional is because I'm very open with how I feel. And I think that's extremely important, especially when you're in a very high stress environment, to not let things get bottled up. So for me, writing was a way for me to have some degree of catharsis as well as educate the general population, because I think there's a lot of value in that. And I think there's a lot of people in general who don't, who just keep everything to themselves and let it get bottled up and then eventually they reach a breaking point and I've learned Through my almost 39 years of life thought that's exceptionally unhealthy to do, especially when you're talking about a field like medicine, and you're dealing with a lot of really sick patients. So So for me, it was it was an opportunity for me to take everything that I've ever learned, be be there for the patient. And also just recognize that we're in the midst of something that I'm probably never going to see for. Again, in the rest of my career. It was also very unique because you had in these instances, you're usually speaking with families and keeping them informed, you know, you are actually meeting with the families but in this case, they were just individual patients. And the amount of speaking that I got to do with these patients were pretty limited because typically if I was involved, it was because the patient was having such a hard time. Breathing, that they needed to get intubated, they needed a breathing tube. And all I could offer in those moments ahead of time was an introduction and saying that we're going to do everything we can to take care of you. On those moments, you feel there is a degree of helplessness that you feel there's a lot of degree of helplessness that you feel when that when that instance arrives.
Unknown Speaker :So, so a lot of these patients they would probably never know you, right? They come into your hospital really sick and they if they survived, they definitely go back without knowing who are their saviors, but you may have build a bond with them Has that happened, other patients that you've tracked,
Unknown Speaker :so, so that the issue so there was a lot of so we have a lot of really, we had a lot of COVID patients, so there was a lot of patients that are hospitalized, but the patients whom I was interacting with on a day to day basis were the sickest patients, who the vast majority of them will never remember or know all of the people that took care of them. It's just an impossible thing. And a lot of these patients, if they did survive were a significant number did not the degree of rehab rehabilitation that they would require after you know, some of these people have been breathing to them for 234 weeks, you know, we don't really know what their ultimate quality of life is going to be. We don't we don't have that data at this point.
Unknown Speaker :How many hours were you working in a shift at the time.
Unknown Speaker :So the way that I
Unknown Speaker :the way that my shift work was I was working 12 hour shifts on the need was they had a lot of staff for the day shifts, so from like a 7am to 7pm shift, but they needed help at night. And you know, if for those many people who've probably never worked in a critical care setting, the night team, the role of the night team is to continue the plan that the primary ICU attending on came up with During the day, but it's not too all of a sudden creates huge shifts in plans, it's pretty much about continuing that plan, as well as taking care of what we call fires that may arise like really acute situations where we need to rapidly stabilize a patient. So my role at night was to essentially be the fire man and help out wherever there were fires, because the rest of the stuff in terms of the plan, the plan was already set. And so that's what made our our shifts a little bit hard on was one we're, we're in the middle, we're working in the middle of the night. We had a lot of resources, but less resources than you would have during the day which is extremely typical in the main things we were dealing with were crashing patients. And, and so you know, where we get calls from the floor, saying that this patient is not doing well. They're not breathing well. So the ICU team would get involved we'd go we would have to stay As these patients intubate them potentially line them up, like putting in big IVs, other monitoring lines, and some of these patients just had very little what we call reserves. So it just didn't take a lot for them to kind of reach a tipping point.
Unknown Speaker :So balancing that,
Unknown Speaker :you know, trying, doing our best to save our patients, as well as making sure that we don't make things worse. is it's, it's, it's a very, it's very fine. It's not the easiest thing to do.
Unknown Speaker :Is this, what do you mean by putting out files?
Unknown Speaker :Yes. So the thing is that what ends up happening is that just because we have a patient that isn't breathing, well, that's one of the primary drivers of this disease. And, you know, a lot of times the initial thing we need to do is we need to place a breathing tube, which by the way, we used to do much more rapidly. But as the disease progressed, as we learned more about the disease, we realized that We should have a much higher threshold for intubating these patients and try to avoid it, because the mortality rate for people that once they got intubated was much higher than the people who did not. And in addition, you know, once, once they're intubated, they're breathing that our small part of it is getting addressed. But as we've seen with this disease, it affects so many different systems. It affects our body in so many different ways that the disease is still progressing. So these patients can still get unstable. They can they are getting a lot of them get sicker. And so then we need to start doing things in terms of managing blood pressure, sometimes their oxygen levels aren't great. Various organ systems are failing. We were dealing with a lot of clotting display clotting issues, which you know, if you read like the newspapers and things like that came out as a big as a big source of issue with this disease. It was just unlike any disease that anyone had ever seen. I mean, just having this degree of effect on so many organ systems. I mean, I've spent I've spoken to some of my colleagues that have been doing critical care anesthesia for 2030 years. And they said that they've never seen a disease like this. It's it's sucked.
Unknown Speaker :Did you feel helpless?
Unknown Speaker :Yeah, a lot of the time I did. And, but, you know, one thing that I've learned in medicine in general, is that you can't focus on that, all you all you can do is do your best. Be confident in your own skill set. And recognize that even your best may not be enough, but you can't allow that to paralyze, you know, you've got it you've got to still be able to move forward on and do the best that you can. And I mean, I definitely had a have moments burned into my head where I really thought hopless
Unknown Speaker :want to share some with us?
Unknown Speaker :Sure. One of
Unknown Speaker :probably the thing that that sets in my mind the most was, it was my first night where things got really crazy. And like I said, we were getting called from the floor multiple times about new admissions, because patients were not breathing Well, they weren't doing well. And we ended up having this young gentleman who was who wasn't breathing very well, a lot of these patients, we would we would actually ask them to lie on their stomach because it would actually help a lot of times their breathing but in this case, it wasn't really helping him very much as well. So we realized that we needed to put a breathing tube in so we get to him and we get them to be to lie on his back. And I spoke to him said you know, hey, I'm you know, I'm a notre Dom em. Winter anesthesiologists on. I'm going to do My best to take care of you. And there was one of the critical care attending surgeons was there as well. So when we when we're, when we're getting ready to put a patient to sleep, there's a number of things that we do that we prep for it before we do it because when we give the medicines to get these patients fully asleep, so that we can place a breathing to the vast majority of these patients if we knock out their entire drive to breathe. So in a patient who's already having a hard time maintaining their oxygen levels, when they're awake, and they're breathing on their own, now we're taking that drive away. So because of that, they they can decompensate quickly. So one thing that we do is we try our best to maximize their oxygen levels before we actually give them medicines to get them to stop breathing so that we can place the breathing tube. Okay, once that happens. Now it's a race against time and getting in that breathing too. as rapidly as possible. The problem with this situation was, there was so much fluid that was coming from this patient from his lungs, that it obscured the view. So I couldn't actually see where to put the breathing tube. And because that happened, we had to emergency do a surgical airway. So they had to emergency emergent Lee make a cut in the throat, the surgeon dead so that he could, so that we could pass a breathing tube through that hole instead to take care of the patient. But while this was happening, the patient coded meaning his heart stopped. We had to do chest compressions, which was really scary.
Unknown Speaker :And
Unknown Speaker :you wear all the gear,
Unknown Speaker :you know, we're all dressed up. We're wearing our personal protective equipment, you're doing your best to take care of yourself, but I think it was like the first Time for me that I ever felt scared for me that the focus wasn't on my patient alone that I was worried about my own safety. Sorry.
Unknown Speaker :But you, the thing is that you
Unknown Speaker :can't really have those moments when you're trying to save a life. And so we still did everything. But there was a little bit of a distraction in the back of my head, which I'd never had before. So we, you know, we just kept working, we put in our additional like IV lines are what we call the arterial lines, we can draw lots of labs.
Unknown Speaker :And we hoped
Unknown Speaker :we actually thought the, that he wasn't going to make it. And so the intensive is called the parents. They came, and he had the conversation with them, specifically and you could just kind of say The blood draining out of their faces. And but he didn't pass. But the question still remains of what his long term prognosis is going to be. And we don't know. Um, he probably he may have suffered from some brain injury because of everything that had happened. And sometimes there's just nothing you can really do about it. And I would say that that was probably the most helpless I've ever felt. And I've, I find myself very confident in my abilities. And it was the first time in a long time that I doubted myself
Unknown Speaker :afterwards
Unknown Speaker :and just really replayed through my head. Did I do everything right? Did I do everything to the best of my ability? And he came to the conclusion that Yes, I did. But that still doesn't take away the feeling when you know Somebody that you're taking care of has that kind of outcome. So that was a big thing. For me. Another example was I had a, so I'm a pediatric anesthesiologist and, and as a result, I'm really, really good with talking to families,
Unknown Speaker :about, you know about
Unknown Speaker :their children. So it's it's a natural extension to be able to talk to families about, about a sick about a sick loved one. And I always keep things very focused. But I'm also extremely honest with families, if their child is really sick. I'm going to tell them their child is really sick. I'm going to tell them I'm not going to promise anything, but I'm going to tell them I am going to do the absolute best to take care of your child. And I also take care of plenty of adults and I take my approach towards adults the exact same way. I don't like to sugarcoat things because I think in a lot of a lot of ways, we end up doing a huge disservice service to families when we're too afraid to have the hard conversations.
Unknown Speaker :So I had
Unknown Speaker :I, one of the, you know, one of the fellows on our unit, she reached out to me and said, Hey, Manoj, can you help? Can you help me out here? They had, as the crisis kind of progressed, we recognized the importance of in instances where we thought the family member was going to immediately pass about starting to be a little bit more lacks in terms of family being able to be at the bedside, not multiple members, but a singular member. And so there was a wife that had been at her husband's bedside since about nine o'clock in the morning. And at this point, when I got when I got called in, it was nearly two in the morning. So the fatness of the wife had refused to leave her husband's bedside, which is not that surprising. Don't blame her for that. But multiple nurses, the fellows, they went in to try to convince her to leave, because they were like it's not safe. And she refused.
Unknown Speaker :So I came in. And it's hard
Unknown Speaker :having these kinds of conversations when you're wearing full project like personal protective equipment, you're wearing a mask, everything, it's hard to have the kind of communication that I want, because I'm very expressive. So I want people to be able to see and not just hear my words, but see my face, so they truly understand where I'm coming from. And so in that situation, it ends up being so much less personal, because you don't have that ability to have body languages as a support. So the words that you use matter even more.
Unknown Speaker :So
Unknown Speaker :the fellow came in with me. I spoke to the wife, and she had her children on the phone that she was facetiming with and and I told her I'm sorry, you need to leave, we can't have you at the bedside anymore. And she said, I said, Your husband is not imminently ill like, at this point. And he's she said, Well, yeah, because he's better now because I'm here. So she said, you know, while he's doing better because I'm here, don't get me wrong. I really do believe in the power of having loved ones by you in terms of its healing properties. 100% I told her said, you know, the longer you're here, the longer you risk exposing yourself and potentially getting sick. And so I said you really need to go we cannot have you here. I had some people that said, you know, why didn't you just call security and they said because this is not that this is not the time what she is asking is 100% reasonable in every other situation. Besides
Unknown Speaker :this situation,
Unknown Speaker :and so I was speaking to the kids, and they said, you know, we were going through this back and forth.
Unknown Speaker :And
Unknown Speaker :they said, don't you think that the family should be at the bedside of their loved one, and I lost it.
Unknown Speaker :I lost it. And I'm, I have no problem
Unknown Speaker :with being very real and very personal with my patients. So I told them, I said, 100%, I said, my dad died and he got to have a huge chunk of his family at his bedside when he passed. I got to be there. My mom, my uncle's, my sister. So many of us got to be there and his last moments. I'm like, not being able to have family members be at the bedside with their loved ones, and potentially their final moments drives me crazy. And I said, there's nothing thing more
Unknown Speaker :than that,
Unknown Speaker :that I would wish that for that to be able to be a reality but I have a responsibility to your mother. I've responsibility to make sure that she stays safe.
Unknown Speaker :I said
Unknown Speaker :I 100% understand I owe 100% agree with you but I can't risk having your mom gets sick as well. And I don't think they you want to risk your mom getting sick as well.
Unknown Speaker :In the moment I mean it
Unknown Speaker :really personal with them. Their demeanor on like, on like the video chat totally changed. And they were like, We just needed to hear that somebody cared about it that we just needed to hear thoughts. You're doing this not because you're a robot, you're doing this because you truly do care. We said I care a lot. And they said, you know, we felt that. You know that before my dad may not have been getting the kind of care that we expected them. It's like you know 100 Stand we all want what is going to be best for our parents in the studio, we were projecting. We just had this sense of distrust, that maybe people aren't doing everything that they're that they can. I promise you, that's not the situation here. But I promise you that we are very conscious of your father. We are doing everything in our ability to get him through this. And the moment of said, We don't mean mom doesn't need to leave the hospital, she can stay we we've found a room for her that she can that she can rest, in should anything change, we will immediately notify her so she can be at the bedside again. And they said, Mom, just listen to him. On my fellow. We spoke about this afterwards, my fellows said,
Unknown Speaker :wow. And I said,
Unknown Speaker :these people are going through like, arguably the hardest moment that they'll ever experience in their life. You
Unknown Speaker :can't at this point,
Unknown Speaker :not connect with them as human minutes and cannot be afraid to share your own personal experiences. Because now you're not talking physician to patient or physician to patient's family. You're talking human to human.
Unknown Speaker :And
Unknown Speaker :I think sometimes people think that we're not human,
Unknown Speaker :physicians,
Unknown Speaker :nurses, respiratory therapists, anyone in health care, who have made a choice to take care of patients is exceptionally human. One thing that that really frustrates me is the idea that, you know, I read a lot of comments from people online on social media that that said that COVID is clearly a hoax because you have these doctors or nurses that are making like these tic Tock videos that are just they're dancing, they're having fun. You know, clearly they're not working. Or you know, oh, I saw this doctor a nurse. Oh, they're just like, oh, laughing You know, outside of these super sick patient rooms, that means that they clearly don't care. the kind of work that we do is hard. Taking care of these kinds of patients is hard. And the going back to what I was saying, physicians are humans. When you're dealing with patients, this sick on a regular basis, we need to figure it, we need to come back to things that help balance us. laughter is an incredible medicine for the heart. It's incredibly healing. If we're laughing if we're having fun while we're at work, that doesn't mean we're laughing at our patients. It doesn't mean that we don't take our job seriously. It just means that we need to do these things to help us get through our days. And we're also To do that, because when we do that we rebalance, and then we're able to refocus. There's, there's a lot of different types of empathy. And I think the thing that healthcare workers really specialized instead is what we call compassionate empathy. And
Unknown Speaker :it's not
Unknown Speaker :compassionate empathy means you feel a connection to your patient and that emotion and that connection motivates you to do what you can to help them. That's balance. It's not a detached, oh, yeah, they're sick of these are the things we're going to do. It can't be an emotional empathy. It can't be where you're overwhelmed by what you're doing. Because if you're being overwhelmed by what we're what what by what we do, you can't do our job. So we need to consistently be able to strike a balance so that we don't get overwhelmed and and I think that's why a lot I think a lot of people see this as detachment. But it's not a detachment, it's ways for us to like recenter ourselves so that we can be the best us.
Unknown Speaker :Um,
Unknown Speaker :I really have a firm belief in being selfish to be selfless. I really believe that I give to myself first, before I can be the best me so that I can give to others on and I apply that to my everyday life, not just in medicine. Mm hmm.
Unknown Speaker :And
Unknown Speaker :I just want people to understand that, that we're humans. And we're not making a huge deal about this. Just because we're trying to make a huge deal about it. We're not being driven by governments or anything like that. We're being driven by our own personal experiences, and recognizing that we would never want this for anyone,
Unknown Speaker :anywhere. So So if things
Unknown Speaker :end up finally slowing down, and our quote unquote hysteria ends up saving thousands upon thousands of lives, I'm fine with that. I don't really care if people think that we, that, that the that the steps society took to try to stave off the virus was too much. It just doesn't matter to me. Because I know those things save lives. Um,
Unknown Speaker :yeah, I know your stories have very emotional. You know, I can see you as you're speaking. I see you there in all of this protective gear, trying to say one life, talk to their families trying to tell them and convey to them the importance of staying safe and healthy, while also wanting to be with their families. And I'm sure all of your colleagues are in the same spot. You're all like dressed up, it's restrictive, you're not able to communicate as effective. tively with this gear on, and you're trying to save multiple lives at the same time, you've been through it together, what has it taught you, personally, individually and as a group? What have you learned from this to handle such situations in the future? Well,
Unknown Speaker :you know, I mean, just from a like a very, like, from a very technical standpoint, you can say that, you know, in terms of a hospital system as a whole, I think hospitals across the country, it's most people's first experience for a with an absolutely massive pandemic. So, in terms of preparation, should there be another spike? You know, we're definitely more prepared for that. But what I would say most, most of all, is that really work pretty well together as a team. You know, anesthesia is very individual, you know, you're taking care of one patient at a time in an operating room, maybe you're working with like another colleague like a nurse anesthetist. or resident on in those cases, you don't really get an opportunity to work with a lot of your other colleagues. And this was an opportunity for us collectively as a group to really work with one another and support one another. And I felt, personally, I felt extremely supportive the entire time. I even after my a particularly hard night, my own Chairman heard about it. And he called me to check in on me and said, Are you doing okay? And I really appreciated that. And I felt that overall, people are exceptionally supportive of one another. And that if people had a really, really rough night, that people said, Hey, if you think you need a little bit of time, just just take care of yourself.
Unknown Speaker :So
Unknown Speaker :I just know that the people that I work with a lot of really great people that I know have my back, and you know, in any institution There's always politics, that's not going to change no matter where you go. But I feel personally very blessed to work with the people that I do work with. And, you know, should anything like this ever arise again? You know, as long as I'm staying at this institution, I know that I know that we'll be able to handle it to the best of our ability.
Unknown Speaker :Manage, how did a day look like to you during this crisis? What, when you woke up? What was the thought that probably crossed your mind? What was your hope for the day? How many patients were you responsible for? What are the What did the What did the scene in the ICU look like? If you could describe a day
Unknown Speaker :so what would happen is so for me, my shift was starting at 7pm that went till 7am. We, because it was night shifts. We had days off and we didn't we weren't constantly on every single night. But so we had we had days to recuperate. So we we got assigned, we were initially told to go to a floor that primarily had anesthesia ventilators so that we could help manage those ventilators in case there was any issues because those ventilators were extremely familiar with. And but we weren't for me, we weren't I wasn't assigned specific patience because there was still intensivists that were scheduled actual critical care doctors that that I was paired with, and every single one of those situations, so they were still the primary lead, but I served as an extension of them. So I didn't restrict myself to any particular floor. I made myself available. I would actually do rounds on my own. I would walk from floor to floor to floor to floor around all the unit asking, Hey, I'm in a Jamia born in the anesthesiologist but I'm functioning as an extension of the ICU attending. Is there anything that I can help out with and we would have Have a intensivist on call would create a large group chat so that we can all be tied in to unknowing when there's admissions, if there wasn't a patient needed, like I like access, like in terms of like a big big IV, or anything on if somebody needed to be intubated. We were constantly on this text. And essentially because there was at the beginning, there was so many fires, having that group text kept everyone in the loop, so that if somebody we knew, okay, this person is assigned to this floor, but there's, they're there. They have a patient that they have to acutely deal with their other people could be mobilized from other floors to go down and help out instead. So there wasn't a lot of organization, I would say in terms of how our night was because the way that the night functions in an ICU when you're having that many fires is you don't know where a fire you might be able to predict that a fire could start here. But sometimes they just happen without Any kind of preparation.
Unknown Speaker :So it was really
Unknown Speaker :a grab bag. Some nights, we had people, there weren't very many fires, people were, you know, they were relatively stable. And then other nights, there would just be multiple people that were getting sicker and sicker, and that we had to address them sometimes like in like the same timeframe as others. So that was why it was really important to be able to have the amount of resources we did. And we and as we were learning what our needs were things changed. So initially, we had a small group, a small number of anesthesiologists that functioned as attendings as well in the ICU. Again, when I say that its meaning as an extension, because our training is actually very critically care oriented. That's essentially what our training is, except we just do that one at a time in an operating room. But as we saw that our needs changed, then we expanded, you know, we were cross we requested additional people to join our team. If we could kind of reorganize where people were being directed, we, you know, increased the frequency that we were there, or decrease the frequency again, depending as as things progressed, and things calmed down that needs obviously weren't as significant. But early on, we had no idea what our needs were. So we have to consist consistently adapt. And that was the whole thing with this with this disease process in general, whether it was about figuring out where to utilize resources or figuring out how do we treat these patients. It was always about adaptability and Anam anesthesiologists were incredibly proficient in adapting. And so for us this
Unknown Speaker :this was our wheelhouse and We got
Unknown Speaker :our department got such exceptional amount of praise from so many people in our hospital across departments, where they pretty much were like we would not have been able to do this without you guys. And so you know, the field of anesthesia when I first when my friend first introduced me to that as a possibility as a career. I initially said, I don't want to do anesthesia, all they do is like do crossword puzzles, check their stocks online, in the operating room. I really honestly thought that as well. And then he said, You know, I think you'd be really surprised by how much we do.
Unknown Speaker :And, and so
Unknown Speaker :I fell in love with it when I realized that but he said something very specifically he said, anesthesia is a field where you need to be content, knowing how much you do, but the rest of the world, most of the world will not. And I thought that this was the first instance on a mass scale where so So many people actually saw what we do. And that was, it was it was cool. It was cool. Like it was it made me this whole experience made me fall in love with medicine all over again. And I think it's really easy to get cynical with medicine. But, but I'm really, I made the right choice in terms of our career.
Unknown Speaker :I have such deep appreciation for whatever you just shared. I'm sure a lot of people are not even aware of the kind of work you do. And there are a lot of people who take the super casually just like you said, What do you have to share with them?
Unknown Speaker :I would say that for those people who, for people, not for those people, I say for the people who who thought this situation was exaggerated. It's difficult to convince people to convince someone that you that something could have happened had we not done this because people are very visual people need tangible proof. So how do you tangibly prove you prevented someone from dying? it kicked in. So this was going to be a lose lose situation from the beginning. And everyone understood that. If we waited too long, there would have been many more deaths. And if we put in super strict procedures, and then now all of a sudden, ma'am, these projections are nowhere near what everyone else had predicted, which means that it must have been an exaggeration and that the disease is not as bad as everyone claims it to be. You say well, right, because you're trying to prevent that. And so, you know, either way, either way, the people who people who are going to be skeptical of this, I don't think the only way to change That skepticism would have been mass death. And that's just not an option. So if people want to continue to believe it's a hoax, believe it's a hoax. I can't convince you otherwise of it. I can just convince you that I saw in real time, that it's not a hoax. And yeah, you know, people want to say, well, that's a New York problem. That's not a nationwide problem. I said, you know, what the rest of the nation saw how bad things got here. And because they did, the majority of the nation started shutting down, because they didn't want the same thing to happen to them. And yeah, a lot. Some states have very low numbers. That is fantastic. Because they saved lives. And I and I understand economic downturn, I mean, hundred percent. I have a lot of friends who've been impacted that are non medicine, by everything that's occurred. People that have been furloughed, you know and are living on unemployment. I am very conscious of that I'm very conscious of mental health disorders for you know, I, I've suffered through issues of mental health in the past as I'm sure the vast majority of people have to some degree. So, but when you're asking me to weigh those against human life, I can't I just personally cannot put some kind of value on a human life and if others can that's that's great. I'm not I'm not judging you but for my me personally, I can't, there's nothing more precious in this world. For me, I can't there's nothing more precious for me in this world, then than life. So it is what it is and I'm I'm I'm content, knowing that I'm content knowing that people that could have died did not die. And I don't need validation from anyone else. All I need is validation from myself. And I know that to be true.
Unknown Speaker :I hope that people who are listening to this heeded heed what you just said. And there's so much value in what you shared. So thank you so much. It has been an emotional roller coaster ride this past one hour for me. I was in tears as I heard you. So were you. I mean, our listeners obviously are not seeing us but I'm sure as they hear what you said. They will be touched. It's hard not to be touched to hear these human stories. Thank you so much for sharing it with us. And I appreciate your time.
Unknown Speaker :Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.