beginning, we didn’t know,” she said. “We didn’t know how these
patients were going to turn out.”
That sense of uncertainty was unique and different; it was something
she hadn’t felt since her training began years ago. “I’ve been
practicing medicine now for 16 years, and for the first time in my
life, I feel like I knew nothing. I felt like I was having to re-learn
medicine all over again,” she said. “That vulnerability that we had
when we first started, I felt like a student all over again. I don’t feel
like that anymore, but every now and then I get schooled a little
bit by COVID. I still have to step back and think through things.”
In addition to understanding the disease more, she has also
gotten more comfortable with her team and is now seeing a consistent
nursing staff on the unit, which allows them to cut down on
re-training new protocols. They’ve been working together for long
enough now that the same people are coming back. She knows the
nurses, and they know her.
“We’ve gotten into a routine of how we are going to treat these patients,
and the nursing staff has gotten to know me and my personal
perks and quirks. They all know what I’m thinking before I order it
or before I ask for it. I almost get annoyed when there’s somebody
new on the unit and they can’t read my mind,” she said, laughing.
While she has grown closer to her team at the hospital, her work
in the COVID-19 unit has pulled her away from her family at home
in a way she has never experienced before. Her husband Matthew has
been working from home since February and was able to step into
the role of caretaker and teacher for their 7-year-old son Brandon.
“Matthew working from home was probably one of the best
things, because Matthew basically did everything at home since I
was at work all the time. We were very fortunate. I know a lot of
physicians, especially families where both partners are physicians,
they weren’t as fortunate as we were.”
Earlier this year, as the pandemic began to spread around the
world, Dr. Briones-Pryor and her husband had a conversation about
what they would do if she were called to care for COVID-19 patients.
Together, they decided she would shower before coming home, leave
her “COVID Cootie Clothes” and shoes outside the house and they
wouldn’t touch each other. Since she began in this unit, she has had
minimal physical contact with her son and husband. She described
one occurrence when the hospital administered tests to employees,
and she was able to embrace her family for one rare moment.
“The day I came home from my negative test, I gave my husband
and my son the biggest hugs and kisses. Since then, I haven’t been
able to touch them,” she said. “We elbow bump, and every now and
then I’ll kiss my son on the forehead. But that’s it. It’s weird when
you haven’t felt that in a while.”
That weird feeling then began to shift to the infamous “mom
MOTHERS IN MEDICINE
guilt” that so many mothers are all too familiar with. She felt guilty
for not being able to help with Brandon’s schooling; guilty for not
being able to hug and kiss her child whenever she wanted; guilty
for not being able to be there physically in the same way she was
before this all began.
“Matthew used to travel for work, and I always used to be the
one who did everything for Brandon. It was hard for me to step
back initially,” she said. “But Brandon gets it for the most part. He
knows his mom’s a doctor and he calls it COVID and he knows
all about that. But at first, he didn’t understand why I couldn’t hug
him, so that’s been tough.”
While her days off work have been few and far between, she was
initially excited to be able to spend time with her family on those
days. However, she quickly found that while she was forming her
own routine at work, her son and husband were forming a routine
of their own.
“I would be home, and there were times that I actually felt like
I was in their way because they had developed their own routine
at home,” she said. “They had this little routine they’d been doing
every day, and when I was off work the first time, I messed up their
routine. So from there on out, I just sat upstairs and watched TV
until they were done because I didn’t want to mess up their routine.
That was tough, that was the hardest thing.”
As she has gotten more comfortable in her “new normal” at
work, she has been able to find a way to balance that with her role
as a mother. In the beginning, she said it was challenging to come
home late at night and have her son ask to hang out, knowing that
she wanted to, but was just utterly exhausted. More recently though,
they’ve been able to strike a balance and make time for each other.
“I was really trying to do things to make an effort to spend time
with him,” she said. “One of the things we started to do was read a
book every night, he and I take turns reading pages. It gives me at
least a little time to spend with him every day.”
In addition, they’ve also found some somewhat unconventional
ways to work around Brandon missing his mom’s hugs. “There was
one day that he was really sad, and he just said, ‘I just want you to
hug me.’ And I wanted to hug him so badly, so I just took him in a
big blanket, and I wrapped him in it and held him for the longest
time,” she said. “Then of course, I went to go wash the blanket.”
For working mothers everywhere, there will always be challenges
to finding the balance between career and family—and mothers in
medicine know this all too well. COVID-19 has presented all new
hurdles, but if the strength of a mother is any indication—I believe
that we will get through it with grace and love.
Kathryn Vance is the Communication Specialist at the Greater Louisville Medical
Society.
SEPTEMBER 2020 15