Contributed Photo
On coronavirus duty: Aharon Benelyahoo.
Called in to help an athletic middle-aged patient keep breathing, Aharon Benelyahoo got a jolt — and a reminder of why he chose to become a doctor.
Benelyahoo was on duty as the senior resident anesthesiologist at Yale-New Haven’s York Street campus, called along with the attending anesthesiologist to any room where a patient needed a breathing tube to stay alive.
By this time, as the week’s rounds continued, just about every bed he was called to was occupied by a patient struggling with Covid-19.
This patient was young and in good health, but within days had become desperately ill.
The patient “looked to be having trouble, but not to the point where they were in extremis,” Benelyahoo recalled in a conversation Sunday. Then he looked at the numbers. The patient’s oxygen level was perilously low. Benelyahoo and the medical team were deeply worried about the patient.
The 31-year-old Benelyahoo already knew that, although Covid-19 tends to hit elderly people the hardest, it can slam “very healthy” people his own age and a little older, as well. Now he was staring at the evidence. It startled him.
“The oxygen saturation had dropped very quickly, which is something that is very unusual for most patients that are healthy,” Benelyahoo said. It was the dreaded condition behind the name Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, and without decisive intervention to rapidly improve oxygenation, the prognosis was grave.
“With the younger people, it kind of sneaks up on you … the patients who are younger and healthier, who look like they may be having a little trouble breathing. You get them on a monitor, and you realize their oxygen levels are at a dangerous point. They’re very low. Even with oxygen masks on them, their numbers don’t get to nearly as high as you expect.”
Like the countless other hospital workers risking their lives to keep New Haveners alive in the Covid-19 crisis — doctors, nurses, aides, cleaning crews — Benelyahoo is on a mission, prepared for long, stressful hours. While Covid-19 has begun claiming lives in New Haven, it’s still the unnerving “calm before the storm,” he said. Daily he sees more coronavirus patients. The pace of cases is slowly building in what is believed to be about a two-week run-up to the sudden leap that has already hit his friends and colleagues working in New York City hospitals.
Like other residents, Benelyahoo has been told that, starting Monday, he may be called in to fill in to cover other services besides his regular assignment. Last week he worked about 40 – 50 hours (in part because of cancelations of non-emergency procedures). Now residents are preparing to work 60 to 70 hours a week. (Hours are capped at 80.)
At this point supplies and beds have been available, Benelyahoo noted, thanks to the hospital’s extensive planning, including clearing out three floors of the normally busy Smilow Cancer Hospital for dedicated care of coronavirus patients. Along with N95 masks, he and others sometimes make use of PAPR (powered air purifying respirator) hoods to avoid airborne infection. (Click here and on the above video to learn more about the hospital’s preparations.)
Benelyahoo needs maximum protection on the job in order to avoid Covid-19 infection: The doctors responsible for intubating and anesthetizing patients can’t stand six feet away. “You’re in the mouth, the airway,” with “all the particles,” he said.
To keep his equanimity on his off hours, Benelyahoo, who is in self-isolation, has been meditating, reading extensively about the virus, and debriefing with friends on a nightly 7:30 Zoom chat. The group of friends on the chat includes other medical workers, including a urology resident at the epicenter of the pandemic at a Brooklyn hospital.
Benelyahoo plans to begin a medical fellowship at New York University in July after completing his residency at Yale. For now he balances fear for his safety and those of his loved ones with a determination to help save lives, a determination he shares with people at all levels of employment at the hospital.
“I’m unnerved. You take every day and you’re trying to look at the positive. I go in every day with that feeling of wanting to make sure I protect myself from everything going on, and also making sure I’m focused and can do what I have to to try to help other people,” he remarked.
“I feel proud that I have some skills that are valuable in this situation. That makes me feel really good about my decision to go into medicine. I’m able to help people in severe situations. It’s a tough thing to do. You know the implications of intubating someone, what that means about how sick they are. It kind of reinforces my decision to go into medicine. I’m happy to be able to do this for people.”
When this is all done, every town and city in America should set up a large and prominent monument to all of our health-care workers, who mostly didn't want to risk their lives and become heroes, but were forced to take on that role nevertheless.
The endless battle that we fight against disease is the longest and most just war in all of human history.
Let us finally recognize the warriors.