By Marian Grant
Those living with serious illness — a life-threatening or life-limiting illness, such as metastatic cancer, dementia, or heart failure — are at higher risk for complications from COVID-19.
Their increased vulnerability has posed additional challenges for the health workers who care for them.
By Samyukta Mullangi, Johnetta Blakeley, and Stephen Schleicher
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought many challenges to oncology care; an area of medicine that typically involves frequent, in-person patient visits to complete a course of treatment.
In many ways, COVID-19 has served as a stress test for the specialty, and has catalyzed adaptive changes that we hope will make the oncology care, and the health care system in general, more resilient going forward.
By Elizabeth Clayborne
I was a little less than six months pregnant when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. As an Emergency Physician, I am well aware of additional risks that my job often exposes me to on a daily basis. We frequently face physical and emotional strife from unstable psychiatric patients, critically ill nursing home residents, sexual assault victims, and newly diagnosed cancer patients.
People who work in an emergency department tend to understand what comes with the territory: a lot of hard work, unexpected outcomes, and daily traverses of the human experience, from the best emotions you can imagine, to lowest depths of human despair. This is what accompanies caring for every ailment for people from all walks of life. I actually love this part about my job! I never know what I’m going to see when I walk through the doors.
That said, being a frontline physician during COVID-19 has provided me with a profoundly different lens on the pressures surrounding health care workers. And experiencing this while pregnant was pretty terrifying.
By Lauren Oshry
In 1982, when AIDS was first described, I was a first-year medical student in New York City, the epicenter of the epidemic in the U.S. To the usual fears of a medical student — fears of failing to understand, to learn, to perform — was the added fear of contracting a debilitating and universally fatal infection, for which there was no treatment. But our work felt urgent and valued, and the camaraderie among medical students and our mentors is now what I remember most.
Nearly forty years later, my experience as an attending oncologist during COVID-19 has been different. Yes, I am older and less naïve, but also this pandemic has been managed in fundamentally different ways. Aside from the obvious federal mismanagement, my own institution has deeply disappointed me. The institutional shortcomings we had long tolerated and adapted to were laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic, and massively failed our patients and morally devastated those of us on the frontlines.
As a provider in a large safety net hospital, I care for a predominantly minority population in the lowest economic bracket. These would be the individuals disproportionately affected by COVID-19, with highest rates of infection and worse outcomes. My patients have the additional burden of cancer.