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The chief of the emergency department of a Manhattan hospital committed suicide after spending days on the coronavirus battlefront, her family said Monday.
“She tried to do her job, and it killed her,” Dr. Philip Breen told the New York Times about his medical daughter, Dr. Lorna Breen, who had been medical director of NewYork-Presbyterian Allen Hospital in the midst of the pandemic. .
The 49-year-old emergency doctor, tired of the battle, was just the last city health worker to take her own life.
Two days earlier, a Bronx EMT who witnessed the ruthless number of the virus was fatally shot with a weapon belonging to his retired New York police police father.
Tragic rookie paramedic John Mondello, 23, worked at EMS Station 18 in The Bronx, which handles one of the highest 911 call volumes in the city.
Lorna died Sunday in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she had stayed with her family, the father told the Times.
Philip Breen said his daughter had fallen ill with the virus while on the job at one point, but then returned to work after about a week and a half of recovery. Still, the hospital sent her home again, and her family brought her to Virginia.
She had no history of mental illness, she said. But when they last spoke, she told him how excruciating it was to watch the contagion patients die, even some even before they could be taken out of the ambulance.
“It was really in the trenches on the front line,” Philip Breen told the Times.
“Make sure they praise her as a heroine,” she added. “She is a victim as much as any other person who has died.”
Arriving later on The Post, Philip Breen, his voice cracking, said he was too distraught to speak more.
Mental health professionals told The Post that the pandemic PTSD is turning into a very real crisis.
“The group most at risk are front-line health care workers,” as well as people who lost loved ones, said Stanford University professor Debra Kaysen, director of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. from school.
An ICU doctor working in the city said Monday that the flood of virus patients can be almost too difficult for anyone to handle at times.
For a time, “it felt like we were standing under a waterfall and we couldn’t breathe,” he said. “Now he feels busy but not in a suffocating way.
“I was in a very low place. But I hope I’m finally starting to get out of it. “
Still, “it is very depressing because people in the ICU are not really coming out of it, and I don’t think my patients are going to live,” added the doctor.
She admitted she has mixed feelings about people clapping outside her hospital and others to honor health workers during the pandemic.
“The clappers make me cry every time I hear them,” he said. “But it is also strange, because none of us feel heroes because we feel defeated by this disease.”
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline’s telephone number is 1-800-273-8255.
-Additional report from Carl Campanile
