A ‘duty to warn’: An ER doctor, shaped by war and hardship, chronicles the searing realities of Covid-19
As a Marine combat medic in Iraq’s Al-Anbar province, Cleavon Gilman saw bodies torn apart by IEDs. He heard agonizing screams, saw burned flesh and penetrating trauma. He stood in pools of blood, tending to fellow Marines with severed spinal cords, missing limbs, and intestines bulging through gaping wounds. He emptied the pockets of the dead, collecting baby pictures and ultrasound photos, removed dog tags, and stacked bodies, sometimes two and three at a time, into refrigerated trailers. He still has PTSD, though he returned from the war 16 years ago. Even so, that experience did not prepare him for the coronavirus.
“Seeing this kind of death is not normal,” said Gilman, an emergency room physician who cared for an onslaught of Covid-19 patients in New York as the virus killed 20,000 people over a matter of weeks this spring. He’s now working in his second hot spot, Yuma, Ariz., which has nearly four times the nation’s rate of new coronavirus cases per capita, a major outbreak in its prison, and a hospital overflowing with patients.
