Friday was his first shift on ECMC’s “Covid floor,” which has existed for only about a week on the hospital's 12th floor.
“I was not prepared for what I saw,” said Jensen, who sat down at home – shaken – and sent a text to a close friend that explained with raw emotion why he felt so stunned.
The friend transformed it into a Facebook post without using the doctor's name, a text that Jensen said has now been seen or shared thousands of times.
“These were the sickest patients I have ever cared for in 25 years of doing this medicine thing,” wrote Jensen, 49, a medical school graduate from the University at Buffalo who has spent his entire life in Western New York. “The whole floor was full of sick people and absolutely shell-shocked staff.”
On duty, he wore a surgical gown above his clothes, along with latex gloves and an N95 respirator — the kind that is increasingly precious in a state closing in on 60,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19, most in metropolitan New York City. Walking along that floor, surrounded by nurses, physicians and support staff for whom he has tremendous love and respect, Jensen felt an emotion in the air he has never sensed so keenly before.
Fear.
There is a shared awareness among his colleagues, he said, “that these people are sick from something that can make us all sick,” and the alarm he picked up from others on the staff was about something far beyond themselves.
It involves anxiety about what could happen to patients at the hospital if too many nurses and doctors were to become sick, as well as the knowledge of exactly what staff members might potentially carry home to those they love.
“You can read about this, you can see it on TV, but you’ve got to feel it to understand it,” Jensen said.