The search for her husband took her from building to building.
Lilian Molokwu knew he was somewhere in the sprawling complex, lying in a hospital bed with a tube down his throat.
The frantic woman crisscrossed St. Barnabas Medical Center’s campus in anguish, looking for anyone in scrubs who might be able to tell her where Dr. Godwin Onochie Molokwu was.
He was fighting for his life after contracting COVID-19. But hospital workers wouldn’t reveal the specific building since visitors were restricted during the pandemic.
“I asked so many people,” the Maplewood woman said.
Lilian thought if she could just touch the building’s brick exterior that day in late May, maybe she would feel a little closer to him. She had come to Livingston every weekend since dropping off her sick husband on a rainy April night. He had given her a reassuring smile and a wave through the clear plastic of the surge tent that said: Don’t worry. I’ll be home soon enough.
It was the last time she saw him.
“I went back home, and then I was just staring...” Lilian said as she started to cry. Her wails drowned out the rest of the words.
Dr. Molokwu died the day after her late May visit to the hospital. He was only 59.
Dr. Molokwu and Dr. Nagi Abraham — an internal medicine doctor and a medical technologist at University Hospital in Newark — are just two in a litany of New Jersey hospital workers who have fallen victim to the coronavirus while battling the pandemic.
No one seems to know exactly how many have died, or is willing to share the number. Not the state Department of Health. Not the New Jersey Hospital Association. Not Health Professionals and Allied Employees (HPAE), the state’s largest health care union.
But the memorials continue to grow, whether on social media, the HPAE website or during Gov. Phil Murphy’s daily coronavirus media briefings.
Only a recent informal survey of health care workers by the HPAE sheds any light on how COVID-19 has impacted them. One in five said they developed the disease. And more than half said they have been exposed to the coronavirus while working at hospitals, rehab centers and long-term care facilities, according to the unscientific online poll of 1,085 members.
The deaths of Abraham, 66, and Molokwu — a gastroenterologist who was affiliated with Newark Beth Israel Medical Center and had an office in Irvington — exemplify the risks hospital workers face amid a crisis that has claimed 12,857 lives in New Jersey.
The two men came from different worlds: Abraham was from Egypt, and Molokwu was from Nigeria.
Each took different paths to medicine and arrived in New Jersey in different decades.
But eventually, the two doctors who became known for their smiles, wit, humor and work ethic would find themselves just miles apart after overcoming long journeys to the U.S.
And both would be exposed to the virus working in hospitals filled with COVID-19 patients.
They are hardly alone among the front line medical workers Murphy has memorialized. Just last week there was also Dr. Michael Burgio of Newton Medical Center, who died in early June. Burgio, 69, was born in Sicily and worked in emergency medicine for 30 years.
And there was Felicia Booker, an employee in the finance department at University, who died in early April, according to a hospital spokesman. The 52-year-old East Orange native worked there for more than three decades.
Booker’s death illustrates that COVID-19 threatens more than just trauma doctors and nurses. It reaches all fields of medicine and all hospital departments.
The Engine
Laurice Rofail spoke softly, almost matter-of-factly.
“I thought he would be OK,” Abraham’s wife said.
He had come home in late March feeling unusually tired for a man who never slowed down.
“He was a high-energy guy,” said Emad Boles, a friend and fellow lab scientist at University.
“He was like an engine around us,” he said.
But Abraham declined quickly.
He went to Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick after spiking a fever. Despite his protests, he was soon discharged after the doctors said he was well enough to fight the disease at home, according to the Abraham family.
“He was very, very, upset... He knew that his status at that time could not be treated at home,” said Marina Abraham, Abraham’s daughter, who spoke on a joint telephone interview with Rofail.
Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital declined to comment on Abraham’s discharge, citing “patient privacy restrictions,” a spokesman said.
Dr. Nagi Abraham, a laboratory scientist at University Hospital in Newark, died in April after contracting COVID-19. The 66 year old joined the legion of doctors who fell victim to the virus.
Back at his home in Edison, Abraham — whose specialty was infectious disease — said almost immediately that he needed to go back to the hospital.
He then went to Raritan Bay Medical Center in Old Bridge, where doctors wanted to intubate him right away. But Abraham was able to delay it for 24 hours, his daughter said.
Like every other health care worker, he knew the grim statistics for those who go on ventilators: Only 20% of patients survived at that time.
The extra day gave him a chance to jump on a video call with his family.
“He kind of felt when he went on the ventilator that he wouldn’t make it,” Marina said. “We just tried to cheer him up. … Deep inside, he knows the complications of a ventilator are pretty high.”
A devout Orthodox Christian, Abraham died within days of his intubation on Easter Sunday. His battle with COVID-19 lasted less than two weeks.
The symptoms emerged in late March.
Dr. Molokwu joked about them at first. He and his wife thought he’d be fine.
Then suddenly, he was not.
Lilian Molokwu wandered the St. Barnabas campus trying to find his building every weekend for about two months after he was admitted. She crisscrossed the parking lot. She approached the front entrance. She asked anyone she came across if they knew him.
She had been in touch with his doctor and nurses throughout. But they would only tell her he was on the fifth floor of a COVID-19 unit.
“There are so many buildings. I didn’t know which building,” said Lilian Molokwu, the mother of his four children, ages 16 to 23.
Sometimes she would park her car outside the hospital and break down in tears.
The day before Dr. Molokwu died, his wife came upon two female hospital workers. They’d also noticed her — the woman frantically pacing every inch of the grounds.
“You’ve been walking here for so long,” one of the women said.
They gestured to the building he likely was in, and for a second, Lilian Molokwu had hope. But then they reminded her only employees could access it.
Somewhere inside, Dr. Molokwu was hooked up to a ventilator with a tracheotomy tube in his throat, a feeding tube in his stomach and an infection tearing him apart.
As he battled the disease, his colleague, Dr. Chukwuemeka Ibeku, would stay in his office. Sitting there in the evening, he would break down and cry thinking about his friend.
“I wish he wouldn’t be one of them,” said Ibeku, an attending physician at Beth Israel Medical Center.
Like many doctors, Ibeku feels powerless fighting a virus with no treatment.
It’s “very, very frustrating... to be taken down by an infection or a condition that you cannot do anything about,” Ibeku said. “There is no treatment, except supportive care. It’s frustrating.”
Molokwu’s family still mourns him, even if they smile at the memories. His crazy dancing at home to Bruno Mars, with the moves becoming wilder the more his family laughed. The fierce rounds of Jeopardy! come 7 p.m., with Molokwu teasing his wife for getting only a single answer on the board.
“We’re very big on Jeopardy!,” she said. After all the tears, she’d managed a slight laugh.
Abraham — who arrived in the United States in 2005 with Laurice, Marina, and son, Peter— was known for his vivid and lively personality. Rofail misses her husband’s intellect and his ability to engage with anyone on any subject.
“Regardless of age, he was always able to connect with them and just have conversation,” she said. “You never had a dull moment with him.”
Inside a hospital, doctors who have fallen ill with COVID-19 look like all the other patients, wearing the same tag on their wrists, surrounded by the same setup of looping tubes and wires connected to ventilators.
They’re helpless just like everyone else.
The difference is, when they parked their cars and reported for work, they knew what they were heading into.
Or at least they thought they did.
“We usually put our lives in God’s hands. Everything in God’s hands,” Boles said. “It doesn’t matter what you do. ... Everyone has (a) certain time leaving the Earth. That’s what we believe, so we try to do our best every day … and put our lives in God’s hands.”
“And that’s what (Abraham) believed,” he added.
Spencer Kent may be reached at skent@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @SpencerMKent. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
Have a tip? Tell us. nj.com/tips.
Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.com’s newsletters.
"share" - Google News
June 21, 2020 at 05:45PM
https://ift.tt/2YSCvgY
These N.J. doctors gave their lives fighting coronavirus. Loved ones share their stories. - nj.com
"share" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2VXQsKd
https://ift.tt/3d2Wjnc
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "These N.J. doctors gave their lives fighting coronavirus. Loved ones share their stories. - nj.com"
Post a Comment