'Still scared': Health workers feel the toll of virus fight

NEW YORK (AP) — Outside a back door to a hospital where the coronavirus hit like a hurricane, a half-dozen staffers gathered recently to look back, and look inward.

“I am still scared,” Dr. Gwen Hooley told her colleagues at Elmhurst Hospital, which was swamped with patients in late March as the virus rampaged through New York.

Physician's assistant Diane Akhbari recalled her husband leaving food on the cellar stairs while she isolated herself for months for fear of infecting her family: “I felt like an animal,” she said, her voice cracking.

Co-workers talked about how terrifying it felt early on, not knowing whether they'd have enough protective gear. How one endured his own case of COVID-19 and others saw young and healthy people like themselves get critically sick. How colleagues discussed drawing up wills.

And how haunting it is to think it may all happen again.

“I feel like it’s a calm before a second storm,” said Hooley, an emergency room physician who lost a relative to the virus.

While the global pandemic hasn't abated, the days when gasping patients arrived at Elmhurst nonstop, when ventilators ran low and deaths so high that a refrigerated morgue truck was stationed outside, have subsided. Not necessarily the pain.

At Elmhurst and hospitals around the country, nurses, doctors and other health care workers are reckoning with the psychological toll of the virus fight, coupled with fears that the disease could flare anew later this year.

“There’s this overarching feeling of ‘Is the next shift going to be the shift where there’s 200 people in the waiting room again?’” said Dr. Samantha LeDonne, an ER physician. “You still can’t enjoy the calmness or feel like you're at normal when you have that in the back of your head.”

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