Our frontline health workers are the first responders in the fight against the coronavirus. These health professionals will also be our guides and community allies on the road to our full recovery as a healthy nation. Thrive Global is sharing their inspiring stories.
My name is Asad Baig and I’m a chief radiology resident at a hospital in New York, so I normally don’t work on the floors. I got called in to help because my hospital was overflowing with patients.
One of my patients was a young man in his 40s who was positive for COVID-19. He had no prior medical history and unfortunately was not doing well and is currently still on a ventilator. We’re working hard to make sure he can get back home to his wife and kids.
This experience has taught me to be grateful for my health and my family’s health. A lot of people think only old people are dying of coronavirus, but there are a lot of young and otherwise healthy people that are sick with the virus. I also realized what a blessing it is to be a physician and to be able to step up. To do any less would be being ungrateful for everything God has given me.
Mental health is extremely important. It’s very hard because during the pandemic there were so many emotions coursing through my brain. There was nervousness, mostly due to the fact that not only was I being pulled from what I do regularly to go help out doing something I hadn’t done for a very long time, but also because we knew so little about the virus. What was it doing to patients? Are our treatments working well enough? What could this virus do to us, the frontline workers?
Every morning as I geared up in my PPE, I felt like I was putting on my armor, to protect myself from this dangerous unknown enemy. There was a sense of unity, and camaraderie with the other residents, physicians, and nurses, many of which were in the same position that I was in, doing their best, taking care of patients in an unfamiliar setting. We fight together, side by side to do our best to protect our patients and to honor our oath to them: Do no harm.
Every morning as these thoughts and emotions ran through my head I said a quiet prayer, “Dear God, please protect all of us who are trying our best to save as many as we can and please save those that we are trying to treat.”
Click here for information about how Thrive Global is supporting our healthcare workers on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic, and find out how you can support the cause by donating to #FirstRespondersFirst.
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