Jennifer Przybylo (Sheridan Road 1999) is a fourth-year emergency medicine (EM) resident physician in the Harvard-affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham & Women's Hospital. She wanted to share some thoughts with the Sacred Heart community:
"The attending physicians and fourth-year EM residents are the most experienced clinicians in the department, and as such, we are responsible for all emergent, high-risk COVID-19 intubations (inserting a breathing tube in order to place a patient on a ventilator). Each day, we see more and more critically ill patients, straining the resources of the emergency departments and ICUs, with the peak of the pandemic in Boston still weeks away.
Life is surreal, to say the least. One day I am helping patients place a hurried call to family members to say a tearful, perhaps final, goodbye prior to sedating and paralyzing them to facilitate intubation, and the next day, I find myself on an Instagram Live interview with Katie Couric (see photo above). I am extremely fortunate in that my parents are currently healthy and safe in isolation, and Mike, the love of my life and a Boston native, has been an unending source of support when I need it most. It is a frightening time, but a time in which I feel both personally blessed, and professionally fulfilled. I chose emergency medicine in order to be there for patients at their time of greatest need, and it's an honor and a privilege to be able to serve on the front lines of this once-in-a-lifetime battle."