When coronavirus first hit in March, Dr. David Burkard found himself having some of the toughest conversations of his life.
He had to let patients know when it was time to say their final goodbyes to their families.
“The hard thing is having to be the person that talks to the patient with Covid, who says, ‘You know what? It’s time to call your wife. We are going to have to put a breathing tube down and it’s time for you to say goodbye,'” Burkard said.
It was a message the emergency room physician had to deliver again and again as the pandemic stretched through summer and into the shorter days of fall.
Burkard, 28 and in his third year of residency at Spectrum Health Systems in Grand Rapids, Michigan, did what he needed to do to keep himself safe. He wore protective equipment at work, a mask on his own time and kept socially distant, he says.
He ran five days a week, played and coached volleyball, ate a healthy diet and had no major underlying conditions. If he did get infected, he thought, he’d be fine.
“I actually, at one point, thought, ‘I want to just get the virus and get it over with,'” he told CNN. “I thought there was no real chance of me having to be hospitalized. I’m a healthy young man.”
‘I just could not breathe’
And then came the sickness and the positive result for Covid-19.
It started with a fever and a cough, and Burkard felt ill, but after three days things improved markedly. He knew younger people could get really sick from the virus, but it seemed he had dodged that bullet. Then day six came around.
“I got out of bed. I went to make a sandwich and move around my apartment a little bit and I just couldn’t catch my breath,” Burkard said. “I just could not breathe.”
He tested his own oxygen levels and he knew — and so did his colleagues when he called — that he had to be admitted.
He went to his own hospital, where so much was familiar but so much was new — and terrifying.
The isolation and loneliness of going into the Covid-19 unit. The suffocating feeling of being breathless. The fear. It was all there, with no friends and family around to soothe his worries.
Courtesy-CNN
