She Helped New York Through the Worst of the Pandemic. Then the Nightmare Followed Her Home

Sixteen months ago, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City, Dr. Rebecca Martin was one of thousands of out-of-state doctors and nurses who came to help the city battle what was then a new disease. That spring, the pulmonologist from Arkansas spoke to TIME about her 96-hour stint at Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in Brooklyn. Martin, 45, wondered at the time how her own hospital, Baxter Regional Medical Center in northern Arkansas, would handle COVID-19 if it arrived. She got her answer this July, when rising infections turned the state into one of the worst virus hotspots in the nation. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] *** When I flew to New York City at the height of the pandemic in April 2020, it was my first time practicing medicine outside of my home state of Arkansas. Before I left to battle a strange disease in the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak, I said goodbye to my husband and four young children, making sure to leave them the passwords to our family’s financial accounts in case I didn’t come back. As a pulmonologist, I suddenly had one of the nation’s most important occupations. And I couldn’t sit around, watching COVID-19 kill more and more people, while my fellow medical workers begged for help. During the 10 days I spent volunteering at Wyckoff, patients were packed so tightly in the emergency room that it was hard to pass between gurneys. There weren’t enough sedatives to go around, so patients would some...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 healthscienceclimate nationpod News Source Type: news