12 "Crazy" Weeks: COVID19 Spotlight on Dr. Risa Fuller
The last 12 weeks have been pretty surreal for Dr. Risa Fuller. Not just because she’s an Infectious Disease doctor in New York City, not just because she’s also married to a physician who was caring for COVID19 patients, and not just because she’s a new mom. If there was ever living proof that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, it’s Risa's COVID19 life--and the last 12 weeks have been a whole kind of crazy.
Risa’s daughter, Aria, was born at 5:04PM on March 2, 2020 at Mt. Sinai Hospital, 24 hours after the first COVID19 case was confirmed in New York, a city that would be described as apocalyptic just a few weeks later. From the moment she gave birth, she knew she wanted to get out of the hospital and get out fast:
The week before Aria was born I was still seeing Infectious Disease cases at Mt. Sinai Hospital. We had suspected COVID19 cases and, at 39 weeks pregnant, we were testing people in the hospital. We didn’t have any documented patients yet--but we all knew it was there. After she was born, all I could think is I HAVE to get her out. I don’t want her in the hospital when this thing blows up.
Getting out quickly after a C-section isn’t easy and Risa’s birth had been really difficult, “I cried through the entire labor and C-section. My glasses were so dirty from the tears that the anesthesiologist asked me if he could wipe them, which only made me cry harder. I really cried so much that I was literally dehydrated. So yes, I’d say the birth was traumatic.”
A Very Ordinary Pandemic Maternity Leave
When Risa returned from the hospital, she didn’t just settle into her Upper West Side apartment, she quarantined into it. The maternity leave she had envisioned--her mom driving in from the suburbs to help every Wednesday, taking long walks in Central Park, and meeting up with friends--instantaneously evaporated. Isolated and breastfeeding, “I was reading New England Journal of Medicine articles at 3am while nursing, scrolling all these physician Facebook groups in the middle of the night, and watching the news all day. The amount of stress and anxiety I was feeling at that moment was insane.”
Just when things felt like they couldn’t get crazier, Risa’s husband, Bill, got word that Columbia University's Irving Medical Center was going all hands on deck. It was the fourth week of March and cases in New York were surging. Bill was likely going to start caring for COVID19 patients at Columbia. Aria was only 21 days old when Risa half-heartedly asked him, “you have a three-week old baby, can’t they take somebody else?” It was half-hearted because she knew that Bill couldn’t get out and, frankly, that he didn’t want to. As difficult as it was, it was something that Risa understood because a part of her felt the calling too, “this is what we train for.”
When Bill got the email a few weeks later making his COVID19 plans official, he struck a deal with his team at Columbia: instead of spreading out his rotation with a mix of day shifts, night shifts, and breaks in between, he would come in and work the night shift for 7 consecutive nights, followed immediately by a week on days. You read that right: that was 14 consecutive shifts on a bursting COVID19 floor, with no breaks, at the height of New York City’s outbreak. The calculus was that they would minimize time apart if Risa and Aria could move out for a few weeks while he treated patients and then self-quarantined.
It was never in a million years what I thought was going to happen during my maternity leave. It was just crazy…. as hard as it was, we felt so lucky that we had an option to separate. It was terrible but she’s not the only pandemic baby of physician parents.
In early May Risa moved in with her parents, 30 miles away, and Bill began working nights. Bill’s nights were chaotically busy and unpredictable. “I made a lot of tough decisions and watched a lot of people die,” Bill chimed in, as he walked into the apartment during our interview after taking their dog, Ralph, for a walk. While Bill captured the peaks and valleys of those COVID19 nights in a video diary, Risa’s days felt endless and monotonous, “Aria cried the whole time. The whole time, for three straight weeks.”
Anybody who has had a baby knows just how much happens in three newborn weeks, “I went to Long Island when she was 5 weeks old and then came back to Bill and the city when she was 8 weeks old: three weeks later I brought him home a completely different baby.”
While the days were long and the nights were hard for both of them, there were at least some moments of levity, “The greatest part was when Bill called me on video chat and asked if I wanted to watch him shave his head. I laughed the hardest I’ve probably ever laughed, which is how I knew my C-section had fully healed.” With COVID19 raging in New York City, Risa hadn’t been able to get to the doctor for a proper post-partum exam.
A “Career Defining” Moment
While Bill was on the frontlines at Columbia, as an Infectious Disease specialist, Risa felt conflicted and helpless watching New York’s COVID19 outbreak rage from the sidelines:
I’m a doctor who was supposed to be on the front line of the thing that would define our generation and my career, and I was just home watching it all happen on TV. I’m an Infectious Disease doctor: this moment is what I’ve trained for.
The older Infectious Disease doctors always talk about AIDS, what it was like during the outbreak and why they went into Infectious Disease because of it. I always wondered about what might be the new disease for me when I chose this speciality and here I was at home, just watching it happen. It was so strange.
As Risa plans her return to work she knows there is more work to do and more to learn about the coronavirus. Still, even as New York and the country continue to battle the COVID19 pandemic, there’s a lingering feeling of being late to the party.
I’ve had such mixed feelings: guilty that I’m not helping, relief that I’m not out there because I have this baby, and kind of jealous that I’m missing out on this major thing that is what all the Infectious Disease doctors are going to talk about for decades… and I’m going to be at the conferences for years saying, “oh yeah, I was out on maternity leave.”
Anybody who has pathed back to work from maternity leave recognizes some of those feelings of “so much happened without me” and the questions of “will they remember who I am?” For Risa those feelings are on overdrive as she prepares for her return to work, so I pressed her: with the coronavirus so unrelenting, isn’t there still so much to do? Without a moment’s hesitation, Risa explained “It really does feel like New York was a warzone and a tiny part of me feels like I missed out on this major thing in my career.” She’s right about New York: it was like a warzone and, as Risa points out in the same breath, “we made the decisions we had to make at the time. Nobody could have predicted this.”
While some people search a lifetime for their calling, Risa has always known that it was medicine. Through our PSATs and SATs, college admissions, undergrad, the MCAT, medical school, residency, and fellowship Risa never wavered. Nearly 20 years later, the freckle-faced girl I once baked brownies with, my Spanish study partner, and my cheerleading team captain now holds impressive and hard-earned degrees from Cornell and UPenn. More importantly she has real passion—which is exactly why I have a hunch she’ll find a very “Risa” way of making up for lost time.
Returning To Work: Risa’s Hopes & Her Advice
Just like Risa’s feelings about her maternity leave, her feelings about returning are equally mixed, “I know that it’s going to be a tough transition but I hope we come back on the other side to a better place.” Ending her leave feels just as surreal as the leave itself, “We haven’t done any of the normal things: I’m going to leave her and I’ve never even had a babysitter watch her while we go out to dinner because of the pandemic.” Adding to that list of “normal” things she hasn’t done as she returns to work, when I asked Risa for a photo of the three of them (her, Aria, and Bill), Risa told me she didn’t have one “because there was nobody to take it” over the last 12 weeks.
The silver lining? She does hope that Aria will one day be proud of being a pandemic baby of physician parents. “Randi, you know that story about how you used to go around as a little kid telling people ‘my name is Randi and I’m a natural beauty’ because your aunt told you so? I want Aria to go around telling people ‘my mommy is an Infectious Disease doctor and I was a pandemic baby’… Can you please make sure this makes the article? Because that natural beauty story is one of my favorite things ever.” Promise kept, Risa, and now back to you…
For twelve weeks she has been isolated at home and in the weeks ahead she will put on PPE. Needless to say, Risa’s return to work is certainly not your average return to the world of conference calls and work travel. Still, there’s a big part of her that is eager to roll up her sleeves and get to work on this disease.
I asked Risa, with all she knows as an Infectious Disease specialist and as someone who has been reading all the literature (even if it’s at 3AM while breastfeeding), what’s her best advice? Risa had three calls to action for us all:
Wash your hands… all the time!
Limit the amount of media you read, especially Facebook: “don’t read that stuff: it’s just not good.”
Just stay safe
Risa has been my friend for nearly 20 years and I can honestly say she is one of the most resilient people I know. Watching her go through this for 3 months, each maternity leave phone chat and text from her felt surreal. After revisiting those 12 weeks in the span of 45 condensed minutes during our interview, I clicked the “off” button on our recording and told Risa, “Even though none of this was new information to me, my head is spinning. What does it feel like for you?” She took a second to think about it before shrugging her shoulders and saying, “just life” with a big smile and an even bigger laugh.
Thank you, Risa, for being you, for sharing your story, and for being one of the incredible Infectious Disease physicians who are going to help us save lives and find a way out of this pandemic.
Randi Braun is a coach, consultant, speaker, and the Founder of Something Major. Get in touch with Randi via email or social (below). Copyright 2020. All rights reserved.
