Jay Dubowsky, MD
I did my medical training in New York, at an inner-city hospital. I trained in the time of HIV/AIDS. I was in the hospital during the riots in Brooklyn, the first and second Twin Tower bombings, and their aftermath. I thought I had seen it all. And then came COVID-19. Treating COVID-19 patients created challenges I had never imagined. And it created opportunities I never considered.
During the height of the pandemic, I was deployed from my clinical practice to a COVID-19 ICU at Mount Sinai South Nassau. I was out of my element, away from the comforts of my clinical practice, and in the intensity of COVID-19 Critical Care. At first, I felt alone. But I soon discovered I was one of a group of professionals gathered to care for Mount Sinai’s COVID-19 patients.
We quickly became a close-knit team. Our strengths merged to make us more effective than any individual alone. There were doctors, nurse practitioners and physician assistants, nurses and techs from every department at MSSN. They came from other practices and hospitals in the Mount Sinai Health System. And there were specialists from other health care systems less hard-hit by COVID-19.
We bonded over the patients. We bonded over patient care. We bonded over the families who were unable to see their ill loved ones. We became the patients’ families. We held their hands, stroked their heads, and held iPad tablets so the families could see their loved ones. We bonded over meals generously provided by the community. We celebrated patient successes, their triumphant extubations, and their long-anticipated discharges. And we mourned their deaths, as one of our own.
We all came together as a Mount Sinai family.
Submitted by: Jay Dubowsky, MD, Mount Sinai Doctors-Manhasset, Assistant Professor, Cardiology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai