PHOTOGRAPH BY MORGANA WINGARD

BRONX, NEW YORK - April 24, 2020:  This is new. You don't understand it. You don't know it. So there was a lot of confusion in the early stages. And I think that kind of contributed to people getting affected more because we didn't understand. It absolutely overwhelmed us.  

From the time you had an index case, it became like a wave of patients. I think I got it probably because I’d been interacting with the negative patients without a mask. They came in for something else like a bone problem or a joint problem. But, now the negative patients started testing for the virus. Over the next few days it started spreading everywhere. That’s when things got really crazy.

When the wave came in and I saw patients getting intubated every hour, every minute. You see that firsthand. You can read about deaths on the news, watch the statistics and get a distant idea. When you witness it, it has a trauma on you, but when you've witnessed it over and over again, even the strongest of hearts become a bit worried.

At the end of March when we had a scarcity of PPE and not enough ventilators, we were running around trying to save lives. There was always a code patient dying somewhere. It was intense. If we’d continued for that period of time in that way, more healthcare people probably would have died. More people would probably have died. I wonder how people think this is not serious. I haven’t had time to sit down and look at data, but I know that on a regular day, in the regular flu season, in a month I’m calling just one or two family members saying that people passed. In this pandemic, I call them two to three times a day to tell them that someone passed from Coronavirus. So I don’t know about the data, but that’s what I’m seeing in front of me. That’s what I experienced on a day to day basis.

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It started with a fever at night after my call. In the morning, I had a lasting headache in the back of my head. The fever wasn't too bad but the second day I started having a mild cough and respiratory distress. I couldn't help sleeping sixteen hours a day. My friends and my colleagues brought me food, but I couldn't eat because I was throwing up a lot. It  felt like when you have the flu times ten. I was having severe aches. I thought I’d stand up from my bed, just try to see if I could stand up. My knees buckled like I had severe arthritis. I was checking my blood pressure, my temperature, and my vital signs to be aware if things get worse. The fear was that there are two ways this can go: either you're going onto a vent and probably dying or you’re getting better over time. I was worried about the fact that I didn't want to be like one of my patients.. I didn't want to go to the ED [emergency department]. I feel like once you get there, your chances of survival drops. I wasn't thinking from a clinical standpoint as a doctor. I was thinking from a patient perspective, patient experience.

Eventually, the fever started getting under control. The knee pain lasted for quite a while. By the time I was getting back to work, a week later, I was having diarrhea. But, the phase when I was super critically ill only lasted for about five days from the first day of symptoms. I grew up in Nigeria. I never had any illness to help bring me that down, ever. 

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When you get back to work, you don't want to get the virus again because you don't know enough about immunity. So you’re twice as panicky. You went through a phase which was very intense. You don't want to experience that phase again. You still got to do your job. And, I think that's where a lot of the heroism comes in for doctors. I went back to work after six days. Everybody was overwhelmed. There was so much scarcity of things. It was only after I went back to work that I got a call that it was actually coronavirus. But, I couldn't say that I'm going to be at home for longer because of the scarcity of staff and man-power at that time. I just wanted to go back. When I got the result of my COVID test, then the fear came in again. But, that's when I had to have a lot of courage and say, “This is your job. You've gotta do this. You almost died and still you've got to do your job.” 

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A few days later, I was on call overnight in the ICU. When I came back home, I was exhausted. So, I went to my room to sleep. Around noon, I was really deep asleep and I heard my door​ like someone was going to break down the door. But, I was too tired. I thought it was from my dream. But, it kept going like they were going to break it down. I heard someone say, "Break open his door. Open his door."  I called from my room, but I didn’t know what was happening. As I stepped out and opened the door, firefighters were about to break it down. I was still groggy. They said, “What the **** are you doing? We've been trying to open this door there's a ****ing gasoline leak in your apartment.” They walked in and found that two knobs for the gas on the stove were turned on. The whole floor of the apartment building smelled of gas. Interestingly, the person that called the firefighters was someone at the extreme edge of the apartment complex—so far away from me.

The guy asked, “Can't you smell this?” I replied, “I can't smell anything. I can’t smell gas.”  I think the guy was dumbfounded. He was just looking at me like, “Are you crazy?” I was still confused. I could not smell gas. I couldn't smell anything. I couldn't, I was just tired. The only thing on my mind was, I want to sleep. I was exhausted. I wanted to sleep. 

That’s when I realized that I had lost my sense of smell because of COVID-19. 

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When I was sick I didn't tell my parents. When you are acting really ill they’re going to panic and get worried. One to two weeks after I got better, I told my mom on Facetime. I said, “Hey, do you know what? Sometime ago I had coronavirus.” She went off. She freaked. It was the most heart wrenching experience of my life. She's crying and I say, “I've been talking to you for an hour. I'm fine. You see me? What if I told you at the time I was actually ill?” She said she was going to swim through the Atlantic ocean.

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Before moving to New York, Dr. Dami Odutola was working at a hospital in Nigeria during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa and remembers preparing his hospital for Ebola patients. Luckily, he never came face-to-face with any. But, in 2020 he found himself in the heart of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States working at a hard hit hospital in the Bronx. After being out sick for six days, he went back to the hospital to continue caring for COVID-19 patients.