CLEVELAND, Ohio — Dr. Yasir Tarabichi, a pulmonary critical care specialist at MetroHealth Systems, feels his empathy for the sickest COVID-19 patients helps him be a better physician.
Tarabichi’s story, as told to reporter Julie Washington, is part of “Faces from the Front Lines of Coronavirus,” a cleveland.com series of stories describing the ways in which the pandemic has affected caregivers and families throughout Northeast Ohio.
Here is his story:
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A normal stay in the intensive care unit at MetroHealth System is several days at the most. But COVID-19 patients can spend weeks or even months in the ICU, especially the ones who are hooked to a ventilator.
Doctors and nurses naturally bond with patients and their families over time. We grow close, because we spend so much time together. It affects you; it’s hard to separate that emotion. You can’t be cold and calculating.
On the other hand, I feel that this empathy helps me do my job — caring for some of the sickest COVID-19 patients — as I guide families along a difficult and dangerous journey.
I have to explain to families their loved one’s condition, and what I as a physician can and cannot do. We talk about when to push for more treatment, and when to transfer their loved one to hospice care.
It’s a person-to-person discussion. We guide them through what we know.
When patients are on life support and unable to speak, it falls to family members to carry out their wishes. Many patients never filled out living wills, health care powers of attorney or other advance directives expressing what their medical wishes would be if they were incapacitated.
Even when there is an advance directive, it rarely addresses the medical reality of being an extremely ill COVID-19 patient. Would the patient want to be on a ventilator for months? That situation isn’t easily addressed in advance directive. These things can get a little messy.
But advance directives are good in that, at least, they get family members talking about their wishes before a medical emergency comes up.
When a patient dies, I reassure the family that MetroHealth’s care team did everything possible without going against the patient’s wishes.
It was hard to see families who have to say final goodbyes to loved ones via an iPad, because the hospital was closed to visitors due to the pandemic.
When MetroHealth began allowing visitors again this summer, I Tweeted with excitement. It’s important for the family to see how their loved one is doing.
Read additional stories in the series here.
A cleveland.com series on the Faces from the Front Lines of Coronavirus.
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