Page 12 - Delaware Lawyer - Summer 2021

FEATURE
Next Right Thing
Sandra M. Gibney, MD
Do the
Stories from the
I do not think of myself as a procrastinator, but I struggled to put into words the experiences I had during the COVID pandemic.
frontline of COVID As an emergency room doctor of 27
of these occasional cases.
The first thing I can tell you is that
COVID did not play by the rules of most infectious pathogens. It could be a silent hitchhiker in an otherwise healthy-appearing host, or it could literally hijack control of a healthy host’s immune system and trigger a self-destructive process of organs and tissues known as systemic inflamma- tory response syndrome.
As an emergency department doc during the pandemic, I can certainly share heartbreaking stories of how young and otherwise healthy individuals died literally hours after falling ill in my emergency room. And I could describe the literal death march of nursing home
10 DELAWARE LAWYER SUMMER 2021
vaccination
years, I have witnessed and treated
my share of infectious pathogens. I have treated patients through the devas- tating effects of HIV, the swine flu, Eb- ola, Zika, and now SARS-CoV-2. Mind you, American medical providers had heard about serious infections caused abroad by members of the coronavirus family with names like MERS and SARS. (These were coronavirus variants named for their locations, specifically the Mid- dle East and South Asia.) But neither of thesebreachedourborders,andwesaw only sporadic cases found in immigrants from areas of the primary infection. Any opportunity to gain knowledge on coro- navirus was limited to the epidemiology