A Doctor s Dark Year | The New Yorker
Brittany Bankhead-Kendall arrived in Boston in July of 2019. Tall and trim, with straight, blond hair, bright-blue eyes, and an easy smile, she has a sunny disposition and the hint of a Texas drawl. She had just finished a general-surgery residency in Texas, and, at Massachusetts General Hospital, she would complete her training as a trauma and critical-care surgeon. As summer eased into fall, she struggled to acclimate to the weather. At the hospital, she operated on patients who d suffered serious injuries people hurt in car accidents or house fires, or by gunshots. Patients would arrive with fractured skulls and ruptured spleens, collapsed lungs and bleeding bowels. Bankhead-Kendall got good with gore.
In March, 2020, as the coronavirus descended on Boston, she learned that her role would evolve. She would be stationed in the I.C.U., where the sickest COVID-19 patients would be treated, and start working primarily as a physician, not a surgeon. Bankhead-Kendall read with care the flurry of hospital-wide e-mails detailing new procedures and protocols: where patients would be isolated, how P.P.E. would be rationed, when additional staff would be called in. Keeping track of new information felt like a full-time job. Still, at first, the surge didn t materialize. There was just this impending sense of doom, she told me recently, over Zoom. Then, all of a sudden, it was at our doorstep.
O brave new world, that hath such creatures in it.