COVID-19 Doctors: What Did Top New York ER Doctor Know About COVID-19 That Drove Her To Suicide?
Source: Covid-19 Doctors Apr 29, 2020 4 years, 8 months, 1 day, 7 hours, 49 minutes ago
COVID-19 Doctors: New York Medical community are baffled by a the death of one the top ER doctors in the state who despite treating and saving the lives of many in the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, decided to commit suicide.
It was reported that Dr Lorna M. Breen, Medical Director of the emergency department at NewYork-Presbyterian Allen Hospital, died in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she was staying with family.
Dr Breen's father, Dr Philip C. Breen, said she had described devastating scenes of the toll the coronavirus took on patients. Also she was kept mentioning about the potency of the disease and the anomalous behavior of the SARS-Cov-2 coronavirus on many occasions.
Dr Breen said his daughter had contracted the coronavirus but had gone back to work after recuperating for about a week and a half. The hospital sent her home again, before her family intervened to bring her to Charlottesville.
49 year old Dr Lorna Breen, did not have a history of mental illness, her father said. But he said that when he last spoke with her, she seemed detached, and he could tell something was wrong. She had described to him an onslaught of patients who were dying before they could even be taken out of ambulances.
He added, "She was truly in the trenches of the front line," he said.
In an official statement, NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia said, "Dr Breen is a hero who brought the highest ideals of medicine to the challenging front lines of the emergency department. Our focus today is to provide support to her family, friends and colleagues as they cope with this news during what is already an extraordinarily difficult time."
It was said that aside from work, Dr Breen filled her time with friends, hobbies and sports, friends said. She was an avid member of a New York ski club and travelled regularly out west to ski and snowboard. She was also a deeply religious Christian who volunteered at a home for older people once a week, friends said. Once a year, she threw a large party on the roof deck of her Manhattan home.
Dr Lorna Breen was very close with her sisters and mother, who lived in Virginia.
A colleague at the hospital he had spent dozens of hours talking to Dr Breen not only about medicine but also about their lives and the hobbies she enjoyed, which also included salsa dancing. he described her as a lively presence, outgoing and extroverted, at work events.
The NewYork-Presbyterian Allen health facility is a 200-bed hospital at the northern tip of Manhattan that at times had as many as 170 patients with Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. As of April 7, there had been 59 patient deaths at the hospital, according to an internal document.
The vice-chair for quality care at the NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, Dr Lawrence A. Melnike said, “ Dr Breen was a well-respected and well-liked doctor in the NewYork-Presbyterian system, a network of hospitals that includes the Columbia University Irving Medical Centre and the Weill Cornell Medical Centre. You don't get to a position like that at Allen without being very talented.”
He added the COVID-19 crisis had presented unusual mental h
ealth challenges for emergency physicians throughout New York, the epicentre of the crisis in the United States
Physicians and healthcare staff are accustomed to responding to all sorts of grisly tragedies, he said. But rarely do they have to worry about getting sick themselves, or about infecting their colleagues, friends and family members. And rarely do they have to treat their own co-workers.
Another colleague said that Dr Breen was always looking out for others, making sure her doctors had protective equipment or whatever else they needed. Even when she was home recovering from Covid-19, she texted her co-workers to check in and see how they were doing, the colleague said.
There are now growing speculations by many medical researchers and doctors on the frontline that the COVID-19 disease is even much more serious that what they are being told and are witnessing, and that certain top government officials actually do know the real truths but are withholding crucial information to the public.
However emerging research on how the SARS-CoV-2 is evolving and mutating coupled with its ever growing potency and evolving modes of attack coupled with newer clinical manifestations and gradual revelations about its characteristics and properties are all painting a very grim future.
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