Revisit DhruvKhullar’s profile, from last April, of a trauma surgeon in Boston as she reflects on the most challenging and emotionally taxing period she has ever faced.
, the medical crisis of the pandemic is starting to wane. And yet its mental-health consequences will linger, for patients and doctors. For Bankhead-Kendall, as for many other clinicians, this has been a long year of fear, despair, isolation, and tenuous resilience.
In 2019, the family moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near the Longfellow Bridge, just across the Charles River from Boston. Brittany started her fellowship in surgical critical care, and Brian worked as an E.R. physician at two community hospitals north of the city. In March, as coronavirus cases surged across the Northeast, they began spending nearly all their time at their hospitals.
Out in the terminal, Bankhead-Kendall waved goodbye from a distance and turned to walk to her gate. She knew that some doctors had been killed by the coronavirus; as she boarded the flight back to Boston, she didn’t know whether she would see her children again. She looked through the window, into the hall. Outside the room, nurses held up signs containing lab results for other critically ill patients and queries about their ventilator settings. Bankhead-Kendall mimed answers to their queries.
In June, in Boston, the pace began to slow. Infections fell across the Northeast, and some of the makeshift I.C.U.s at Mass General were dismantled. But Bankhead-Kendall was still seeing-19 patients, and her nightmares continued. In dreams, she sprinted toward their rooms only to arrive too late; she stared at them through windows as they gasped for air over the sounds of alarms and ventilators. She saw herself separated from her children forever.
Still, she noticed something unsettling. Increasingly, people who were rushed to the hospital after acute trauma were found to be infected with the coronavirus. This could only be a sign of rampant community spread. Bankhead-Kendall realized that she’d ridden the wave from Boston to Lubbock. Within a few weeks, coronavirus cases exploded.
“I was losing it with these flashbacks,” she said. “Before, it was, ‘I can’t do my job and be a good mom.’ Now it was, ‘I can’t do my job and deal with P.T.S.D.’ ” For a few days, she worked to suppress the visions; she willed herself to stave off intrusive thoughts. At first, it seemed to work. But, over time, she started to feel numb. “Things I used to dread, I didn’t anymore,” she said. “I knew it wasn’t healthy. I’d think, Do I really need P.P.E.
She spent the next few days hiking and meditating. She started reading a few books about P.T.S.D. “At first, I thought, Am I just being a little much?” she said. “I wasn’t dropped in a hot zone in Baghdad or something.” But, as she read, she began to feel that she was fighting the same kinds of demons. “The worst types of P.T.S.D. are ones where people experience something horrible and can’t remove themselves from repeated exposures,” she said. “That’s what happened to me.
It was dark and cold when she woke up. She put on sweats, sneakers, and a jacket, and made her way down a paved path along a gentle stream that cut through the resort. Where the path ended, she stepped onto the rocky desert terrain and walked toward the mountains. She sat on a flat rock and shivered, digging her heels into the red dirt. Beside her stood a large cactus and a few shrubs. She looked into the distance and waited.
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