This is the fifth New Year since the onset of COVID-19 in America. I am a pulmonary and critical care physician who had spent a decade of my life working in ICUs before I became an ICU patient myself in 2025. As a physician, husband, and father of four young children, I had been saving others. But this year, I needed to be saved.
Transitions are times for introspection. How do I cultivate gratitude in the face of trauma? How can I be hopeful when the future feels tenuous? How can I be resilient if I feel broken? I struggled with all these questions this year.
The outside world did not help me with answers. The tone of our discourse is toxic. Our public officials often communicate without empathy. Our trust in institutions is waning. Like many physicians who weathered the pandemic and its fallout, I am all too familiar with the detrimental effects of toxic discourse, a dearth of empathy, and declining trust.
From doctor to patient
My illness shattered my trust in my own body. It destroyed the illusion that only other people got sick. After a week rounding in the ICU at the end of February, I got influenza. It caused a severe asthma exacerbation that left me critically ill in early March. It felt like I was breathing through a straw.
After 10 days in the hospital, I returned home, grateful to be alive. But while discharge marked the end of my hospital stay, it was just the beginning of recovery. I couldn’t sleep. I was weak, unable to get upstairs without a cane. 10 weeks after I went home, I returned to the ICU as a doctor. I looked the same, but I was changed inside.
I learned that gratitude is not as straightforward as I believed. I wish I had not gotten sick. But I am grateful I did. It brought me closer to my family. It taught me more about what it means to love, and to be loved.
The nuance of gratitude
Gratitude is nuanced. We cannot be grateful for living unless we embrace the truth that life is tenuous. Unless we accept that we are lucky. That our lives did not have to turn out as they have.
We cannot appreciate light without accepting that darkness exists.
By navigating the darkness, I also rediscovered the importance of hope. As an ICU doctor, I frequently share bad news. My job is not to crush hope, but to hold it cautiously, along with my patients and their families.
As a critically ill patient, I hoped to survive, and to return to my family. Going home, I hoped I would still be the same man. The same husband and father. The same doctor. Of course, I wasn’t.
Hope is complex. We only hope because we understand that our lives are not guaranteed to continue in the future as they exist in the present. Change can be a good thing, or not.
Redefining resilience
These lessons on gratitude and hope changed my understanding of resilience. I thought I was resilient because I was intact after the crucible of medical training. Because I was still standing despite the sleepless nights that came with raising four children. My understanding of resilience was incomplete.
Resilience in the wake of traumatic illness did not mean I was unscathed. Far from it. When I got home, I was grateful. But I felt broken, diminished, like a fractured shadow of myself.
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I found healing in connection: With family, friends, and colleagues, who offered support in many forms. With my therapist, who helped me reassemble the pieces and make meaning out of what I had been through. With my wife and children, who still loved me, even when our roles were reversed.
I was resilient not because I withstood the storm by myself, but because I blew over, and there were people around to help me stand back up.
Being resilient did not mean going back to the man I was. Certainly, there are parts of him in me. I am still a critical care physician, a husband, and a father. But I am different, too.
I am more grateful. For the life I have, for the people I love, and for the experiences that made me who I am. I am more hopeful for a bright but uncertain future. I empathize differently with my patients, having been in the bed myself.
I am alive, and despite what has been happening in our country, I am grateful for 2025 and hopeful for 2026 and the future. I am also grateful for flu shots, which might have helped save my life. Grateful for the medical professionals who did save my life. And hopeful that life-saving vaccines and medicine will be there in the future, for me and my children.
How about you? How were you resilient in 2025? What are you grateful for? What do you hope for in 2026?
Ian Barbash is a pulmonary and critical care physician.
