3 - Stories from a Pandemic Part II: By My Side
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What does the episode introduction reveal about the theme of needing support during a pandemic?
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You're listening to The Nocturnist, stories from a pandemic. I'm Emily Silverman. One of the hardest things about being a healthcare worker during a pandemic is that we've all experienced and borne witness to moments that nobody should have to go through alone. In this episode, we hear three very different stories about the importance of having your people by your side. We'll hear from Sarah, a pediatrician who recovers from a tough surgery without family support due to strict COVID-era visitation rules. Allison, a psychiatry resident whose grief about her mother's passing two years prior found echoes in the patients she cared for as a COVID intern in New York last spring. And David, an ER doctor who found himself in the impossible situation of having to intubate his own colleague.
This episode is called By My Side.
The pandemic has been just kind of enmeshed with my cancer journey. Those two things will forever be the same story, I think. I think a lot about this as I'm sitting at home, post-op, healing and bored, that It's been both a blessing and a curse that there's been a pandemic during my cancer treatment, because while I've been physically completely torn apart and put back together, I haven't had to be out in public for anyone to see it. In December of 2019, my mom was actually diagnosed with breast cancer. And we have a pretty strong family history. I was overdue for my mammogram that I'm supposed to get every year. And so when she had gotten her diagnosis, I called and scheduled my mammogram. It was about two weeks after my mom got her diagnosis that I had my biopsy and got a diagnosis as well.
That was a complete shock. I was in a really busy, booming practice. It had been a rough year, and we were all already pretty burned out. Anyone who's been in practice for a long time knows you have waves of good and bad. And then I got my cancer diagnosis. When I started to learn what my treatment was going to be and how involved it was going to be, how much time I was going to have to be out of work. I thought it was really telling and a little bit sad that one of the things that I have to admit I thought was, oh my gosh, well, at least I'll get a break. Right around the time of the third round of chemotherapy, we started to realize that coronavirus was coming. What
chemotherapy
does to a woman's brain, the kind of immersion back into work that you used to be really fast and good at, and then suddenly you have to slow way down and ask for a lot of help. The first day back, I had a little bit of hair, essentially what looked like a buzz cut. That loss of hair, it's so visible and you can't hide it and you have to end up talking to people about it. We kind of all agreed that to ease me back in, I would start with just rounding in the newborn nursery. You know, in the old days, rounding on a newborn would have taken me five or 10 minutes. a few clicks, look through the vitals. And then the longest part of it is talking to the family and checking in and making sure they're doing okay.
I remember that I logged in to the computer and I looked at the weight and look at the weight and oh my gosh, I couldn't do the math. And I had to get my phone out. And I just had this panic. I just had this panic. Like, you know, I'd been at home. I was doing fine. I could do the dishes and drive the kids and do a basic grocery list. Suddenly I couldn't, I couldn't do it. I called my oncologist and I was like, I can't, I was not mentally prepared for it to be like this. The initial advice that I got was just get a lot of rest and do crossword puzzles. My mom and I still laugh to this day. If anyone ever buys me a crossword puzzle or hands one to me, I mean, we want to have a bonfire. A crossword puzzle is not going to get to that level of thinking that you don't have after chemotherapy has wiped out your ovaries and your estrogen and your brain function.
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