Inside the Facebook Group Where Doctors Process Their Immense Coronavirus Grief

[babylonsister]

July 7, 2020
Inside the Facebook Group Where Doctors Process Their Immense Coronavirus Grief
“If I die alone, who ever will remember that this happened to me, or know why?”
Will Peischel


As she sat on her couch in her house, alone, sick with COVID-19, an unwelcome series of thoughts crept into Erica Bial’s mind. If I die here, she wondered, who would ever notice? How long would the neighbor’s cat take to find me? Bial, a neurosurgeon living in Massachusetts, works at Lahey Hospitals northwest of Boston. She was two weeks into her self-imposed isolation with the disease, when it took a turn for the worse on her 45th birthday. “I had been—I thought—getting better,” she said.

Then came the seizures, the shortness of breath, and the feeling of being even more isolated as her symptoms became more serious. Bial, who doesn’t have children and had been furloughed from work, was severed from her usual supportive networks. Fear of infecting her colleagues prevented her from going to the hospital as a patient. “I probably have never gone that long without seeing someone,” she said. “It’s harder on the body than you think.”

After nearly seven weeks, she recovered. But during her illness, she couldn’t shake the question: “If I die alone, who ever will remember that this happened to me, or know why?” Where would she—and other physicians locked in the fight against the disease—be memorialized if they died? She saw no options, so in early April she created a Facebook page that she called COVID-19 Physicians’ Memorial.

The premise was simple: Create a community of mourning by running a record of announcements about the deaths of US physicians from the coronavirus. A digital graveyard, group-sourced by members of the medical community and close readers of the obituary section. Bial launched the page, informing friends and colleagues. Soon, doctors, next of kin, spouses, patients, random people, reached out to her with requests to share the passing of these physicians. “Within two weeks, it had gone from word of mouth thing with some colleagues and friends to several thousand people,” she said.

The page now has expanded to include about 200 stories. The page testifies to the threat COVID-19 poses to everyone exposed. Herbert Henderson Jr., a medical examiner in Carroll County, South Carolina, was 56 when he died. “So young,” one commenter observed. Another physician who appears on the page, Priya Khanna, who worked at Clara Maass Medical Center in New Jersey, was only 43 when she died in April. Not long after, her father, Satyender Khanna, a doctor at the same hospital also died from the virus. “What a blow to family and healthcare,” someone wrote. Another observed, “This hurts my heart. Looks so much like my family, could easily be us.” A third simply commented, “Heartache.”

more...

https://www.motherjones.com/coronavirus-updates/2020/07/inside-the-facebook-group-where-doctors-process-their-immense-coronavirus-grief/

[intrepidity]

1. The answer: the Internet

Imagine living through these times without the internet. I can't.

[Maraya1969]

2. FB link

https://www.facebook.com/groups/317464005892297/

[OhioChick]

3. 94,000 healthcare workers have contracted COVID-19 since 2 days ago.....

And more than 760 have died from the virus.

Yet, Trump health chief says US healthcare workers ‘don’t get infected’ with COVID-19.

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/07/trump-health-chief-says-us-healthcare-workers-dont-get-infected-with-covid-19-as-94000-have-contracted-covid-19/

Many are committing suicide, as well.

[renate]

4. I don't know which is more tragic

That the virus happened at all, or that it literally did not have to be this bad.

This is like people dying by the thousands in Vietnam after the war had already been essentially lost, solely for politicians’ selfish reasons.

[Nevilledog]

5. Just heartbreaking.

[GusBob]

6. My telemedicine colleague

I speak with routinely, she seemed subdued while discussion a case I asked her if she was alright, suspecting the worst as she is in Arizona
A physician whom has just retired and was her mentor, a nurse in her clinic and a janitor as well
Passed from COVID within 2 weeks