Dr. Max Lazarus, a resident at a hospital on Long Island, N.Y., went into emergency medicine exactly so he could respond to crises.
He remembers pushing stretchers around the lobby of Bellevue Hospital as a volunteer in the emergency room during Hurricane Sandy.
“This is what I signed up for,” he says. “It forces you to grow in a way that I don’t think anything else could.”
But Lazarus says nothing could fully prepare him to watch patients call their family members before going on a ventilator.
“You tell them that hopefully they will wake up but there is a chance they may not,” he says. “It’s not the way anyone should die, alone on a ventilator.”
Lazarus, 29, still thinks about two patients he treated early in the pandemic — one was a bit younger than he is, the other a bit older.
“And they died,” he says. “They really stick out.”
The pandemic has magnified long-standing concerns about labor and mental health among medical residents who say they are being mistreated by hospitals under unprecedented stress.https://t.co/QNq7Wt1mtK
— NPR (@NPR) May 20, 2020