How the pandemic is affecting the residents [PODCAST]

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“When the director of my general surgery program asked for a report on how the pandemic was affecting the residents, I queried my colleagues, promising anonymity to encourage candor. I received a wide variety of responses and reactions. Some are thriving; others are not.

In the end, I cannot decide if things are going well or not. That may be because everything still feels uncertain and, at times, overwhelming. Parts of our health system are shining, and others need improvement. As residents, we’re frightened; we’re fearless; we’re overworked; we want to work more. But we are all proud of our work, our colleagues, and our institution. Generations of doctors have lived and died without facing a catastrophic health event quite like this one. Our institution and our forebears have faced many. This is our time.”

Maggie Connolly is a general surgery resident.

She shares her story and discusses her KevinMD article, “How are the residents doing during the pandemic?”

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Hosted by Kevin Pho, MD, The Podcast by KevinMD shares the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from.

Transcript

Kevin Pho: All right, welcome to the show, where we share the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from. My name is Kevin Pho, founder and editor of KevinMD. Today on the show, we have Maggie Connolly. She’s a surgery resident and wrote the KevinMD article “How are the residents doing during the pandemic?” Maggie, welcome to the show.

Maggie Connolly: Thank you. I’m happy to be here.

Kevin Pho: All right, we’re going to get into your article in a little bit, but first off, please share your story and your journey to where you are today.

Maggie Connolly: Sure. So I was born and raised in Baltimore City, and I grew up with my mom being an emergency department nurse. I sort of started getting into medicine when she would come home; I would ask her about her patients, and I always wanted to know particularly about the traumas. And so she started getting me into the ED when I was in high school, and then it went on from there. I went to Washington and Lee for college, which I loved, and then I spent a year in DC doing stroke research, and then back to Baltimore for med school, where I fell in love with trauma. And then I came to the MGH for residency.

Kevin Pho: Fantastic. And you are at Massachusetts General Hospital. How has the pandemic affected you and your institution?

Maggie Connolly: Yeah, so I am in my first year of research, just finishing that now, so I haven’t been clinical. But when COVID came here, basically all of our labs shut down, and the research residents became clinical again. So my role has been primarily in one of our COVID surge ICUs. It used to be the burn ICU, and then it became a COVID ICU. And I also was a member of our new COVID line team, so we do arterial lines, central lines, and dialysis lines for the COVID patients.

For me, it’s been really rewarding to be able to have such an active role that feels like it matters when everything else is kind of so crazy and you can’t do much of your normal life. This is something that I can do, and it feels good to be able to do it.

Kevin Pho: Well, thank you so much for doing what you do. It’s definitely much needed on the front lines. So you wrote the KevinMD article “How are the residents doing during the pandemic?” Can you tell me the story behind that article and why you decided to write it?

Maggie Connolly: Yeah. I was asked to give a town hall for the Department of Surgery on how the residents were doing. My program director asked me to do it, and initially I was super enthusiastic. I was like, “Of course I will do that. I’m going to tell everyone how much I love working in the ICU and how great it is when you’re able to extubate someone who’s been intubated for three weeks.”

And then I started talking to some of my co-residents who I am not working as closely with; they’re not in this ICU. And I realized that while I had been feeling like I was having a relatively positive experience, not everyone felt that way. So what I had planned to be a really uplifting report from the front lines, I realized, wasn’t fully honest and representative of everyone.

So I talked to a lot of residents. I wrote down everything they said, and then I sort of organized it and came up with what seemed like a relatively appropriate way to say it to the whole Department of Surgery, representing the people who were struggling as well as the people who were doing well, without sort of throwing anyone under the bus or making it look like anyone was whining and complaining.

Kevin Pho: So maybe if you go into a little more detail, what were some of the challenges that you heard from your other residents?

Maggie Connolly: There are a lot of challenges, and there’ll be a challenge for one person that is a strength or a highlight for someone else. I think that just is a testament that we’re all handling this differently.

But one of the things that some people had a challenge with was that some people got redeployed, and it was a random selection. And so some people who got redeployed to other services felt like the department didn’t value them as much. Thankfully, they realized that they had an important role on these other services where they went to help, but initially that was a big frustration.

And then other residents who were on services that were totally unrelated to COVID, where it felt like they were just kind of babysitting patients at night, felt like they didn’t have a useful role. And so the sort of overarching complaint in terms of the roles was that if you weren’t doing something that felt useful to exactly what is going on now, it became more of a problem of burnout and frustration with the job.

Kevin Pho: And what kind of support did your institution offer to these residents who came up with these challenges?

Maggie Connolly: We tried different things. They sent out some psychiatric support, or some groups that you could talk with, or counselors you could talk to. And then what was the best thing for me was when an attending just sent me an email and said, “Hey, just checking in. How are you doing?” I encouraged other attendings to do that for everyone, because that mattered so much.

But I think the biggest support really is us, for each other. We’re a pretty tight-knit group, and if we see someone struggling, I think we all sort of band together and recognize that and try to help that person.

Kevin Pho: And speaking for your fellow residents, what are some things that your institution can do to help address these challenges going forward?

Maggie Connolly: I think one of the frustrations, or fears, has been that burnout is starting or happening. And now, just a couple weeks ago, we started opening up our operating rooms again, which everyone’s excited about because they missed operating but at the same time have sort of felt overworked. And so having some way to decompress and sort of release some of the anxieties or fears or stresses that have built up would be well-received.

Kevin Pho: So you’re a general surgery resident, and I was wondering if you could comment on how the pandemic has affected your training.

Maggie Connolly: It’s probably been not as much of an effect for me because I’m in research. The challenge for me was that I was about nine months into my first of two years of research and really starting to get into the swing of it when the lab just shut down, and all the progress that I had made sort of came to a screeching halt. So that has been frustrating. Luckily, our lab just reopened, so we’re starting to get back to everything there, but that was a huge holdup. A third of the year went by, basically, that I lost, of only two years. But in terms of the training for clinical surgery, I didn’t miss anything there.

Kevin Pho: So let’s take a step back. We’re talking in the first week of June now, and as you said, things are opening up in Boston. So if you could give a prediction over the next few months, what’s your perspective in terms of how that’s going to affect not only your training but your hospital as a whole?

Maggie Connolly: Yeah, that’s a great question. I wish I knew the answer to it. The most recent graphs that I’ve seen have been predicting a second wave to happen in August and to be worse than the original one, although maybe not as sharp of an incline, but an overall greater amount of people getting sick. So I sort of am expecting to get called back into the hospital in around August.

That could come sooner, because that graph, I think, was made just before all of the sort of unrest has begun, and I think people are out and in contact with each other a little bit more than we thought everyone would be. So it may be sooner that we start to see people in the hospital again.

Kevin Pho: And I was wondering if you could share with your audience something that you’ve been curious about recently or something that you’ve been passionate about.

Maggie Connolly: Well, my new hobby, I don’t know if it’s truly a passion: I’m teaching myself how to embroider. And so that’s a little bit of technical skills for surgery, I guess, and it’s a nice way to sort of decompress at the end of the day. I don’t know that I’d call it a passion, though.

Kevin Pho: Yeah, I think it’s tremendously important to have a hobby, something out of medicine, because medicine is just so all-consuming. And my final question: What’s your take-home message for the KevinMD audience?

Maggie Connolly: Yeah, I think I sort of already touched on this a little bit. If you are a family member or a mentor or a friend or an acquaintance of anybody who’s been working in the COVID unit or taking care of patients or working a little extra hard, or some essential employee, all you have to do is reach out. The email that I got from my attending saying, “Hi, I’m just checking in. I want to make sure you’re OK,” meant so much to me. And that would take five seconds of someone’s time to do.

I mean, you could do more. You could send a bottle of wine, or you could send a box of treats. But really just checking in with some of the people who have dealt with a lot of, or carried a lot of, the burden of caring for very sick patients, I think that would be huge.

Kevin Pho: Well, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for your story and your insight. On the show, we have Maggie Connolly. She’s a general surgery resident, and she wrote the KevinMD article “How are the residents doing during the pandemic?” Maggie, thank you so much for being on the show.

Maggie Connolly: Thank you.

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