HJNO May/Jun 2025

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF NEW ORLEANS I  MAY / JUN 2025 27 mentioned crisis standards of care. Like, one day, we’ll just say, “And that last patient was the patient that turned us over. Now every- body’s getting bad care.”It’s not that black or white. It’s this slow drift into things I never thought we would do. But it was that slow but deliberate way in which we weren’t tak- ing care of people the way we knewwas the best, but we were taking care of people the only way we could get it done. For me, and I think for the community … I think if I could go back, I would tell them — and they wouldn’t know to listen — I would tell them to listen to the people who under- stand the virus. It’s not new. But if you read John Barry’s book [ TheGreat Influenza ], this all happened already. And we just need to take lessons from the past, and we would get through it better. But I don’t think that any- thing we could have informed ourselves of would have changed the trajectory. We had to live through it again that way, and we did the best we could. I’m just so thankful that we have the opportunity to, kind of, talk about this; and I hope that in the years to come, because this will happen again, that lessons learned and stories like this are reviewed by people who have to tackle the next big thing that our community is going to face. n So, I’m thinking about being short and brief. And then each clinician gets up and gives a story of we are out of … we’re out of tools. I tried to give a controlled message because I didn’t want to freak people out. And anger is not a way to freak people out, right? Telling them exactly what to expect is. And I was always hesitant because I didn’t know how they would take what I knew would happen. So, I decided to tell people what I knewwould happen, which was that lots of people would die over the next cou- ple of months and that we would do the best we could. People threatened me online. I didn’t go online to read. The hospital contacted me about whether or not, maybe, I wanted to take a break from speaking to the pub- lic because people were asking what my address was, and did I have any fear for my children. And just like when [I was told] what’s happening in the news, I was like, “Are you serious? I had no idea. This is crazy.” We didn’t change what we did. There was no reason to. We have incredible trust in the power of this community, and I don’t think that a few threats of people who like to post more than anything else were going to stop us from continuing on. You know, on our pandemic plan, we That was Delta. That, I didn’t know it at the time. We knew that India was having this huge increase, but not necessarily that Delta was in Louisiana yet. And quickly, over the next several weeks, lots of information came out about Delta so that we knew that it was different, that it was hurting young people, and that we would need to be prepared again for something cataclysmic like we had seen in March of 2020. I felt like the writing was on the wall, and I felt like absolutely nobody was lis- tening. They were ready to start school on time, play summer ball, and just ignore that this was going to get any worse. People who had gotten vaccinated were vaccinated and people who weren’t were not going to get it. I remembered, why do we do this? We talked about this earlier. How do you find this renewed strength? Because our com- munities need us, and we work at a hos- pital that serves our population. Whether they want to be vaccinated or not, they’ve got to get through this. And so, that was my mindset going into the next press confer- ence. We had a lot of speakers that day, and I don’t always want to be the voice of doom and gloom, for sure. I already did that a cou- ple weeks ago; didn’t really help. And I also wanted to give all of our other clinicians a chance to tell their story for their hospitals.