Jeff

“We went from being heroes to pariahs, and it happened in a matter of four or five months,” says Jeff.

Jeff is a PCC Spanish student. He’s also an emergency physician with Oregon Health & Science University. At PCC, he’s taking non-credit classes to improve his language skills; he wants to be able to “order food and catch the bus” in Spanish. At OHSU, he has been on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As coronavirus started to spread in 2020, the emergency department went into survival mode. They shared information with physicians around the world, watching the virus spread inevitably toward Oregon. When it arrived, they leaned on experience from earlier pandemics, notably the HIV/AIDS epidemic, says Jeff.

There was an intensity to those days that was grueling, he recalls, but there was also a lot of love coming from colleagues and the public:

“Our specialty really gained a lot of appreciation,” he says. “We had kids drawing pictures: Thank you doctors for saving lives. It really was a sense of appreciation I’d never seen in my career before.”

As a rule, emergency medicine is not for the faint of heart. Kind letters from kids are not the norm:

“I get middle fingers; I get stuff thrown at me; I get yelled at; I get screamed at; very rarely do I actually get a thank you,” says Jeff wryly. “So this was a whole new thing, a sense of appreciation and, of course, that lasted a good year.”

In 2021, as coronavirus vaccines became available and the more dangerous Delta variant prevailed, the attitudes toward doctors and medicine in general began to change. People refused the vaccine, which Jeff knew would protect them; they sometimes forced him to promise they wouldn’t be vaccinated in the middle of having intubation tubes shoved down their throats to breathe. Others had seen treatments advertised online and demanded those instead of known life-saving techniques.

“All of a sudden, our patients were basically fighting us,” he says.

As a veteran of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Jeff didn’t feel as stressed about the abuse in the way younger doctors and nurses did. But he did feel protective of his staff. They were tired. They were stressed. And now, they were angry. Working in the pandemic felt like whiplash: “Two months ago you guys all loved us and now you're hating us.”

Doctors and nurses wondered why they would serve folks who didn’t want to be treated, he recalls: “Why am I going in there and taking a chance, exposing myself and then possibly exposing my family, my kids” for people who don’t want help, they wondered.

“I really had to kind of psych myself up before every shift and go okay, Jeff, today you're playing dad to a whole bunch of a family here. They are going to look at you and they're going to feed off of you, and if you're angry, pissed off, fed up they're going to be even more so,” he says. He tried to stay calm. Nevertheless, he saw many doctors and nurses quit or move to better-paid, lower-stress specialities.

The result has been medical staffing shortages, a situation that Jeff calls a “a second pandemic.” He’s worried that the quality of medicine will suffer for several decades, until a new generation of nurses and doctors come up into the field.

“We’ve left one pandemic, and we’re entering another,” he says.