A young doctor reveals what ground zero looked like at COVID’s peak
A post-medical school residency is meant to ease young doctors into what can be a chaotic, high-pressure profession. For Britt Malatskey, MD, her time as a resident physician will likely be the most chaotic, high-pressure experience of her entire career, no matter how many decades she practices medicine.
Malatskey has spent the last six months working at three different hospitals in New York City, serving on the front lines of the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the world. As an anesthesiologist, it’s her job to perform the tracheal intubations on COVID patients who can no longer breathe on their own, hooking them up to ventilators in the most urgent and dire circumstances. And throughout much of April and May, all of the circumstances seemed dire.
“You didn’t get to sit down — you’d finish one intubation and then another one was called,” Malatskey remembers. “Nobody would have time to finish the paperwork in between. I remember one of my colleagues, he had to do four in a row. By the time he went to write the notes on the procedures that he did, one of the patients had already passed away.”
Looking back, Malatskey estimates that at the height of the pandemic’s ravaging of New York, she was doing an intubation every 30 minutes, while normally, a hospital will do an emergency intubation every 24 hours. Every inch of the hospital was dedicated to the COVID-19 patients, including rooms that were usually used for patient convalescence. All elective surgeries were canceled; it was all-hands on deck, at every moment of the day.
As a resident, Malatskey works multiple 24-hour shifts a week, and when things were at their worst, she hardly ever slept a wink. Even when she wasn’t on duty, sleep was hard to come by; the scenes she witnessed in the hospital played over and over in her head as she sat alone in her apartment, her roommates having scattered so that Britt didn’t risk passing along any infection or taking something back to the hospital with her.
“I didn’t have anyone here — I don’t have any family members here and I couldn’t see my friends, who were all at hospitals too,” Malatskey remembers. “The most interaction I had outside of work was the doorman at my building. One day, when I was leaving to go back to work, he said to me ‘you’re my hero.’ It was just the nicest thing. I said ‘and you’re my hero’ and went back to the hospital.”
If you would like to send thanks to Britt, you can reach her here.
