Dr. Albert Rossi: Today I have the wonderful honor and privilege of interviewing a friend of mine, Dr. Alexis Vien. We have a friendship that goes back more than six years, and during that time we’ve been in contact—off-again, on-again, but in contact—mostly by phone, but there’s never been a period of just break, large time. We sort of have kept in contact. From my point of view, that’s been very good. So today I will interview Alexis, who is a physician working in a hospital—we won’t name which hospital—in New York City during this pandemic time. So, Alexis, frankly I think that this interview will be of interest to our listeners, and I think they are really interested in the inside of you, what your life is really like. Would you tell us, please, a little bit about what a typical day and typical week might be for you at this time?

Dr. Alexis Vien: Thank you for having me on. It’s definitely an honor and privilege, because this podcast has been very meaningful to me over the years, so thank you for having me.

That’s a hard question to answer in some ways, what a typical day or week is like, because I feel like it changes every single day. It’s been a roller-coaster ride, it seems like, from I guess near the beginning of March when everything started. I think since then life has changed a lot. I would say things really started changing for me in the middle of March; [that] is when I started working in the hospital and taking care of COVID patients. I would describe a day as filled with a lot of anxiety and fear and just wondering what to expect, also mixed with times of inspiration from my colleagues and my boss, everybody coming together to kind of rally and figure out how we were going to respond to this challenge. Since then, we’ve changed our work-flow, our work schedules. New York has gone into lockdown. So there are just a lot of emotions and changes during this time. [Laughter] But I definitely think it started out in just a lot of fear and anxiety, but also a lot of energy to come together and to figure out how to tackle this together.

Dr. Rossi: And it’s my understanding from talking to you that the hospital you work at is virus patients only. All others have been farmed out. Is that true?

Dr. Vien: So that was true for… At the beginning of my time in service, in March I started out with no COVID patients, and two weeks later my entire service was only COVID patients, and we had transferred all of the non-COVID patients to a nearby surgical hospital that had kind of shut down their surgeries during that time. For a good chunk of a month, or at least four weeks or so, it’s pretty much everybody that came in that I saw had COVID and that was the main thing we were seeing. I would say over the past two weeks now we are getting back to having both COVID and non-COVID patients.

Dr. Rossi: Fascinating. And you were telling me that there was one stretch in that, for various reasons, you worked 14 straight days.

Dr. Vien: Right.

Dr. Rossi: How was that?

Dr. Vien: Interestingly, that actually is kind of how our schedule works even before COVID. Sometimes when we work with residents and interns and students, we work with them for two weeks to provide continuity of care and continuity of teaching. So that was scheduled before COVID, and it was a little more challenging in COVID, because taking care… Just with all the unknowns and all the anxiety and the emotions really running high with my colleagues and the patients, it was pretty emotionally exhausting and physically exhausting to be on for that long, and wear gowns and gloves and masks all day. By the end of those 14 days, I was pretty exhausted, mentally and emotionally. Interestingly, the night that I finished those 14 days, I started realizing I didn’t feel that well, but thought I was just physically tired and exhausted, but over the next couple days developed more and more symptoms and realized that I had COVID that following week.

Dr. Rossi: When you realized you had COVID, how did that strike you? That is to say, what it new news, catastrophic, or the next thing?

Dr. Vien: It was interesting, because I was very afraid, honestly, and I was very… Yeah, I think I was very afraid. My mind went to pretty dark places, like I thought that I was going to be intubated and put on a ventilator. I thought that I… I guess I just had a lot of worries about what it was going to look like for me, mainly because I had just come off service. The thing about this virus is that we don’t understand it yet and we don’t understand why it affects some people severely and other people it doesn’t, and I had taken care of a 26-year-old that week who almost needed to be put on a ventilator. One of my colleagues in her 30s was in ICU around that same time. She didn’t require a ventilator but was very sick. Then I was taking care of other patients who were older who were doing okay, or other people who didn’t make it that week. There’s so much that we still don’t understand about the disease and why some people are okay and get through it and other people don’t. So all that uncertainty and the things that I had seen had me pretty worried.

Dr. Rossi: Oh, yeah. So at that point you understood: “Uh-oh, I have the virus!” And then were quarantined, self-quarantined, for 14 days. Then what happened?

Dr. Vien: So that was a hard time, because that was a time when we were really busy at the hospital, and I wanted to be there, and then I wasn’t feeling well. But I did quarantine and isolated, and once I was asymptomatic and cleared from our employee health services, I returned back to work and started training to learn how to use ventilators and work in the ICU, because that was the need at the time. Then as soon as I got trained in ICU, I was then redeployed to the regular floors, just because the shifting work-flow and the need at that time was on the regular wards, and I’ve been there since then.

Dr. Rossi: Here’s an impossible question: Do you have any idea where or when you got it?

Dr. Vien: I think that… So this is all conjecture, but in the beginning, we had a hard time identifying which patients had the virus and which didn’t. We didn’t realize that sometimes when we were testing people and their test was coming back negative that maybe it was earlier in their disease and that’s why it was negative, or it was a false negative. I had a patient who tested negative. She had a fever and pneumonia on her X-ray. We tested her for COVID; it came back negative. But then several days later, since her fever persisted and she had other symptoms, we re-tested her and she was positive. But in the meantime I had been in her room without a mask on.

Then I think another element was we didn’t know if we needed to wear N95 masks in all the rooms in the beginning, and we did not wear them in all rooms in the beginning with COVID patients. Now we do, and I wonder if not wearing those masks in the beginning may have exposed me a little bit more.

Dr. Rossi: It really is such an unknown, weird virus. I was speaking with a woman on a conference call, Zoom, so she was part of a group, and she was holding her baby, and she said that she is positive for the virus. She said she’d self-quarantined herself totally, and the only thing she ever did was go out to the playground, and that’s the only place she could have gotten it. Okay, it’s just life. There’s no way to be 100% protected from it.

And you were telling me—so life is strange—that to go back and forth to work you had to rent a car. I don’t know quite why, but I suppose probably transportation is a bit dicey these days. And that one day, not long ago, that car was towed, impounded by the police. [Laughter] And when you went to get it, it cost you a small fortune to get it out of the tow. Is that true?

Dr. Vien: That is true. It is true, and it happened during a work week where I was pretty burned out and feeling pretty run-down. It wasn’t a very welcome event! [Laughter]

Dr. Rossi: Oh, boy. It’s so good to have you laugh. It is so good to hear you laugh. I’m going to suppose that you handled it in a very ladylike, fully Christian manner and were totally composed when you heard the cost of the car. Is that true?

Dr. Vien: That’s not true. So definitely there have been times in all this that I’ve felt a lot of kindness and love for my neighbor, and that was not one of those times. [Laughter] It was a messier time, where I felt a lot of anger and just a lot of frustration that I took out on the guy who impounded my car. But it was also interesting, because he used the word… I showed up after work and told them I was a healthcare worker and I was sorry, and he used the word, like, “Oh, you’re a hero during this time, but this is just the law and you’ll have to take it up with the judge.”

I think that was one of the first times that I realized how much I sensed this weird disconnect in that word “hero,” and I was trying to figure out why it bothered me in a way. I think it’s because, one, I was still really angry at him and not acting like a hero, and, two, I think throughout this time as a healthcare provider, I’ve felt extremely powerless. All of the tools that I’ve normally had as a physician in terms of evidence and studies and journal articles and learning about the path of physiology of disease—I have none of that to rely on. And my colleagues and I are doing the best we can, but there’s not a lot of data or guidance for us in terms of what to do. A lot of times we have the answers, but right now we don’t have a lot of answers and we can’t tell our patients exactly what’s going to happen to them. I think that feels very powerless and very not like a hero. I think this event just kind of highlighted that even more, just how powerless and messy this has all been.

Dr. Rossi: And if you don’t mind, I will make you more uncomfortable right now and I’ll tell you how I think. This is for the sake of our listeners as well. My own understanding is that the heroes in the wars or wherever don’t comprehend at that time necessarily that they’re heroic; they just do what needs to be done. That said, I think that you and your few colleagues, physicians, really should have your pictures on the front of Time magazine with masks on and the gowns that you wear at work and the word, how do we say, “Local Heroes,” because, hey, you’ve gone into a hospital and at the end of the day out from a hospital, with all of these persons, humans, who are drastically sick in some cases. So that’s my little “hero” thought, making you more uncomfortable.

Dr. Vien: I think that if that’s the case then also the other essential workers who expose themselves…

Dr. Rossi: Oh, yeah.

Dr. Vien: And, in a way, people who stay at home. That is a heroic act. It’s an act of denying oneself—and even wearing masks. I’m sick of wearing masks, but that can be heroic if we are doing it for our neighbor and for somebody else. Yeah, there’s a lot of heroes at this time.

Dr. Rossi: There are. What would you say in these weeks has been a high moment at work, and a low moment at work?

Dr. Vien: Good question. I think a high moment was: I had a patient who was an older gentleman, and my resident and I walk in the room, and we had just gotten the test results back that he was positive for COVID. We told him that we had some hard news to share. We told him his diagnosis. And this older gentleman—he looked like he was a body-builder, just this really strong guy—just broke down in tears. I mean, just started sobbing. It was heart-breaking to see, and I think me and my resident were a little bit taken aback, but we sat there with him, I held his hand, I asked him to just kind of express to me what he was feeling.

He said he was incredibly scared and that his fear was compounded by the fact that nobody was coming in his room. Everybody was walking by, nobody would come in. He felt just like he was going to die alone in there. He had heard that nobody could visit, and that doctors and nurses are trying not to go in as much to these rooms for exposure. So he thought that nobody was ever going to come in and nobody was ever going to be with him, and he was really scared. But he thanked us profusely just for being there, listening to him, sitting down next to him in his room, and giving him a chance to just say how he was feeling. Just saying kind words in this time has been incredibly healing and powerful for patients. Having that experience and leaving the room and him just being so thankful that I had just come in to see him that day, so thankful that we just took the time to listen to him and to be with him. It was just an incredibly high moment. He ended up staying in the hospital for a while but doing well and getting discharged.

A low moment happened—there’s a lot of them—a husband and wife couple were both admitted to the hospital. I was taking care of the wife, and the husband was on my colleague’s team. The husband passed away, and the family decided not to tell the wife, because she was just so sick and just not doing well and so anxious herself. They ended up passing away in separate rooms, and just not even realizing that their loved one was next door. The children were not able to come in and visit because of distance but also there’s a strict visitation policy right now. That was a pretty low moment, I would say.

Dr. Rossi: Really low, and as you said there were many of them, many, many. I would just note that, in the newspapers last week was the story of Dr. Breen, a young woman, physician, who worked in New York City. She worked in the ER, not in your hospital, but same hospital system that you work in. And she committed suicide, saying that—I forget the exact words—but that she worked as much as she could and it killed her, those were her father’s words. One of the things she said in the article was that in the ER she just couldn’t take any more, that the patients were dying before they got out of the ambulances.

Well, as I said to you, her work killed her, and because of your faith and your ability to take care of yourself, we all are held accountable and do things that are self-care. Your work is actually giving life to you. You know its purpose, you know these human beings. So that’s a contrast in my mind.

Alexis, we’ll wrap up. Any last thing you want to say?

Dr. Vien: I guess I want to say thank you to those who have stayed home and who have worn their masks and who have thought of their neighbor before themselves, because we have flattened the curve in New York City. We are seeing a downtrend, and it’s because of all of our efforts together, and we’re all in this and connected to one another. Everything we do does affect our neighbor. So, thank you, and thank you for having me, Dr. Rossi.

Dr. Rossi: Well, Alexis, you know it’s my joy. And I will close saying this is Dr. Rossi for Ancient Faith Radio, reminding me and the listener to support Ancient Faith with our prayers and with our finances, because Ancient Faith Radio depends on us. There’s no great windfall of money. There’s no diocese or grant that support this. So with that I will say thank you, Alexis.