by Dr. Hisam Goueli
I wanted to help. On March 25, 2020, I drove to New York in my Fiat with my dog to join the fight against the COVID pandemic.
For
the past seven months, I treated corona virus-positive adult and
geriatric patients requiring in-patient psychiatric care. And although I
knew the American healthcare system was broken, the pandemic acutely
highlighted the remarkable inequities in health services and outcomes.
Patients with lower socioeconomic status were disproportionately
hospitalized on the units and three times more likely to die.
Witnessing
death was not new to me; what was were the countless unnecessary
deaths, the virtual goodbyes via tablets, and the inability to meet the
acute needs of my patients. I continue to struggle to forget the faces
of patients gasping for air, the blueness in their lips as their lives
slipped away, and the sadness of my colleagues who struggled to not take
each death as a personal defeat.
While I am not a quitter and cannot think of my life without caring for people, I cannot deny that the pandemic changed me.
How
do you process a mother of four being separated from her children for
suffering from severe psychosis, despite having no psychiatric history
or risk factors? Or the heartbreak of telling a family- in the same
week-that both their mother and father had died? Or the fear of catching
an insidious illness while begging for the equipment you need to care
for patients?
The person I was eight months ago is now lost to
me. After practicing for ten years, for the first time in my life, I am
wrestling with feelings of hopelessness and helplessness regarding our
failed response to COVID and the moral injury of witnessing the worst
political failure of my lifetime.
Dr. Hisam Goueli is a Seattle
based, board certified, psychiatrist and is affiliated with multiple
hospitals in the area, He received his medical degree from University of
Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health; Dr. Hisam, born in
Minneapolis to Egyptian immigrants.
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