-For weeks, New Yorkers cheered and clapped
for the city's healthcare workers.
The doctors, nurses and EMTs
who have faced down the pandemic are hailed as heroes.
But many have never felt so afraid.
-Life at the end of this -- hopefully we'll all make it --
Life at the end of this will be very, very different.
-The good thing is that the team is strong and sticking together
and keeping our spirits up,
but this is going to wear heavily on everybody.
-You know, how are our EMTs, our paramedics,
our nurses, our doctors, our hospital staff,
you know, the morgue technicians,
the funeral directors who have dealt with so much death,
more than anybody should ever deal with --
how are we gonna be after all this?
-You may be working in a situation
where your job is to save lives
and you fail and fail and fail to save lives.
They die in ways that start to wear you down to the point
that you don't feel like you're a good doctor or nurse anymore.
You want to give up on your career.
You may hit a point of feeling so much grief,
you're in despair.
-Mental-health experts like Rita Brock
have a term for this experience.
They call it "moral injury."
-So, when we're in moral distress,
it means that our whole relational system
and our entire body systems are at risk of breaking down
because morality is core to being a human being.
So it's a serious affliction.
It's a deep kind of suffering.
If you don't address the suffering,
it can impact people's lives for a very, very long time.
-There are certain instances that are traumatic
and that will stick with me for the rest of my life,
and this was definitely one of them.
-For cardiologist Sanjum Sethi,
the hardest part is not knowing how to help his patients.
-The reality is is that there was multiple people
that were so critically ill and that, no matter what we did,
we couldn't seem to --
we couldn't seem to turn the corner on this virus.
It really is relentless because you will make modifications
to their care and support them,
and then the next day or a few hours later,
things are worse again.
-And when patients die, they die alone.
-A big part of critical-illness care
is interaction with families.
And now, the families were removed from the equation,
and that's really tough.
-When you work so hard and you do such amazing work,
but the outcomes aren't good at all in so many cases,
and when the threat level is so high
but you have to keep coming and charging into work
every day in fear of what may happen to you
or what you may do to your family,
that same level of anxiety just reminds me absolutely of my days
on the front lines of Desert Storm, Desert Shield.
I feel like I'm absolutely closer to death now
than I was even on the front lines of Desert Storm.
-Rocky Walker is a military veteran
and a chaplain at Mount Sinai Heart Hospital.
-We've had several colleagues that have actually passed away
from this COVID pandemic.
They contracted this doing the very thing that we're doing,
and what a terrible sacrifice,
and this COVID pandemic is going to end some day,
some day soon, hopefully, and we're going to win.
But even after we win, the ones who have been lost,
they don't come back.
And that's just terribly hard.
-Even in normal times,
many healthcare workers are under enormous strain.
-So, before COVID hit, we knew that about 40
to 50 percent of healthcare professionals
had substantial symptoms of burnout,
that they were much more likely
to have burnout than other US workers.
-Lotte Dyrbye is a leading researcher on burnout.
-Physicians and our trainees are sometimes very reluctant
to seek care for emotional or mental-health problems
because of potential ramifications
to medical licensure or ability to get malpractice insurance
or short-term disability or long-term disability
and even getting hospital privileges.
-One of my colleagues said there's a morning meeting
in her facility,
and there's the morning check, and "How's everybody doing?"
And everybody says, "Oh, we're doing fine,"
but some of them are not doing fine.
And they don't feel that they can say,
"I'm freaked out of my mind here about what's going on
and I'm so afraid
that something's gonna happen to my family
because of my professional role there."
-As the first wave of coronavirus cases subsides,
clinical professor
Greg Hinrichsen says healthcare workers need help.
-There's a certain amount of sucking it up,
saying, you know, "We got the mission
and we're gonna carry it through,"
and that's beautiful and that's what we need
and for which we need to be so grateful
to people who are in those circumstances.
But some people also need a space to privately say,
"This is just all too much."
-I worry that there are gonna be physicians and nurses
that don't choose to continue doing clinical medicine
after this experience.
-In hospitals around the country, doctors and nurses
are doing what they can to support each other.
-We're all actively looking for signs
of stress from our co-workers.
We call it a buddy system here,
and everybody is looking out for yourself
and looking out for the person next to you
because people won't always speak up,
and what we don't want
is someone to be suffering in silence and suffering alone.
That's the last thing that we want.