A Doctor Looks Back on the Pandemic Year

“We Were on the Frontline”

For many of us, the pandemic ushered in new appreciation for healthcare workers at all levels—from the janitors who keep hospital rooms clean to doctors trained in intricate surgical procedures. With the worst part of the pandemic ending in the U.S., we spoke to Dr. Carol Holobinko-Haluszczak, an internist who runs a small practice in Bath, New York, and is also a longtime parishioner in the Diocese of New York and New Jersey. She spoke about her tribulations in the pandemic year, the icons that adorn the exam rooms throughout her practice, and the prognosis for public health at this stage of the collective recovery.

Could you tell us a little about your background and your medical practice?

Well, I graduated medical school in 1985 from Philadelphia, then I finished my residency in New Jersey and landed here in 1989—in Bath, New York, which is in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. I’ve been here since. My business partner and I are board-certified internists, and we’ve had our own practice here in Bath since the early ’90s. We treat adults and teenagers older than 13. A big part of our practice is primary care. We've graduated away from hospital work. After you've put in so many years of service, they start taking you off the call schedule.

And what’s your parish?

I go to Holy Trinity Orthodox Church in Elmira Heights, which is about a 45-minute drive from here. We've been going for roughly 20 years. Before that, we were a part of the Ukrainian Orthodox Diocese. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church wasn’t in communion with any other Churches, which is why we didn't find Holy Trinity earlier. Later the patriarch regularized UOC as under the omophorion of the patriarchs. So that's how we were able to go to Holy Trinity then.

Could you walk us through your experience with COVID?

Yes, I've been a doctor on the ground for 30-some years, and we've never seen anything like this. The last pandemic we had was back in 2009, with the H1N1, and none of what we're seeing today is what went on then. The CDC had a webinar on January 31, 2020, trying to get the word out about COVID, and I decided to participate, because we have Corning Inc.1 near us, and they send a lot of people back and forth to China, or at least they did. And I thought, Hey, maybe I'll get a case of this—not knowing that within like six weeks, we would be shut down completely here in New York State.

So we were on the frontline. It was very, very, very difficult to know what to do, because the things were happening so fast. We would come in the morning with a battle plan, change it at lunch, and by supper change it again. We ran around trying to find personal protective equipment (PPE). Luckily, we were able to scrounge up two full outfits of PPE. But in the infectious-disease world, you're supposed to change those with every encounter. And we had two. So the stress was unreal. I even went down to the local hardware store looking for N95 masks. They were sold out. Things got out of hand very quickly. But we came up with a way to control the influx and outflow of our office. For anybody who had a respiratory illness,

"It was really rough going in the beginning, and we needed all hands on deck, not only kids, but the heavenly hosts."

we would have an outdoor visit. We figured we had a better chance out in the country, because we do live in the country, with them in their vehicles, rather than here in the office. Because at the time, the guidelines were that if you found out you had a COVID patient in the office, you had to quarantine that room for cleaning for an hour, and we only have five rooms—so how would we do that? We'd be dead in about half a day.

On top of all that, the testing kits were really hard to come by. We were lucky we got any at all. We would get five a week, and we had to be very careful about who we were testing and who we weren't, because you don't want to waste them. And then there was a turnaround time of five days, so that didn't help either. We were used to rapid flu tests that diagnose an infection in about 10 minutes; in this situation it was five days of not knowing whether the patient had COVID or whether we had been exposed to it. All the changes in the CDC, the WHO, the White House— it just went on and on and on.

I imagine it took over your whole practice.

Oh, yeah. We watched our entire schedule just, like, crumble. So when Governor Cuomo locked everybody down, he put out a message like on a Wednesday that said, “Look, anybody who can switch to telemedicine, do it.” So we talked to our electronic medical-records people there and they said, “Well, you're on for the tutorial tomorrow, which is Thursday.” In a normal situation, it takes four to six weeks to learn telemedicine in an established practice. We were up and running in 72 hours.

Whoa.

(Laughs) We were scrambling. Luckily, my youngest son, Chris Haluszczak, lives in New York City, and he's in computers. He was our lifeline. I couldn't get audio and this and that. I finally reached out to him and said, “Help!” We were doing three-way phone communications, then he was trying to get into our computer. He was able to find out what the problem was and help us correct it quickly. He's used to it because we've had a family business from day one. Anytime anything needs to be done, your kids end up doing it, that’s how it works.

Thank God you had that support within the family.

Yes, and there was another example of that: my cousin’s husband, Father John Haluszczak, in Pittsburgh, sent up an icon of the holy unmercenary. I put that right in my room that I dedicated for video visits, so those women doctors were right above my head when I was on with the patients, trying to learn how to use this technology.

And then back here in my own office, I have a Russian icon of St. Luke the Surgeon. It sits here on my desk. It was really rough going in the beginning, and we needed all hands on deck, not only kids, but the heavenly hosts.

What a beautiful image, the icon of the unmercenary doctors being above your head. So how did your patients fare over the course of the year?

In the beginning, we made out pretty well. The summer was quiet. Then in December, we started with the second surge, and we had lots and lots of patients with COVID. In January, we had a number of deaths. We did a lot of fielding on patients who had gone to the hospital and received Remdesivir, and then had returned to the community. They would come here for their hospital follow-ups. To a T, they all felt like lepers. It wasn't their physical selves that were struggling, it was their spiritual selves, their mental selves. They were petrified that they were going to give this disease to someone else. They were afraid people were going to see them as pestilence and toxicity in the community.

I'm really on top of that when I'm talking to our COVID survivors. I try to make them realize that they are returning into society because they are well. They cannot give this disease to other people, effectively. I know there's all this material on the internet and social media that says otherwise. But these people needed that helping hand, that person who was willing to touch them, to hug them. They had this terrible feeling of being unclean.

Your faith has probably always played a role in your medical practice, no?

I think it has, yes. I'm also a DO—a doctor of osteopathy. We’re trained in holistic medicine from the very beginning. That dovetails well with religion and faith. I have an icon of an archangel, or of St. Panteleimon, or Ss. Cosmas and Damian, or some other saint in each room. It's up on top, so it's not like in people's faces, and they don't have to venerate it or anything. But nobody's ever objected to it. I've had them in there for ages. So I think they know what my status is, and I'm not trying to convert them. I'm just trying to live my life.

Lately we’ve seen vaccination rates flattening around the country. As a doctor, are you telling people to get the shot?

Yeah, definitely. Since the vaccination program began in the middle of December, the hospitalization and death rate, coast to coast, have just gone straight down. The other thing about being vaccinated is that it improves your ability to move around. The CDC is saying that if you are fully vaccinated, meaning that two weeks have passed since you got the second shot, you don’t have to quarantine if you have contact with somebody who has COVID—or you don’t have to quarantine, in New York State, if you leave the state and then come back. And if you’re with other people who are fully vaccinated, like you are, you don’t have to wear a mask, even if they are from different families.

How should we be thinking about our risk level in this new stage?

Well, the mRNA vaccines, Moderna and Pfizer, are 95% effective. That still leaves a 5% chance, but in general, you’re taking a lot more risks than this every day. You’re getting behind the wheel or using your lawnmower or weedwhacker. What I don’t want to see happening people using this 5% risk as a reason to stay away from church, to stay away from community, to stay away from work. It’s not reasonable. We don’t make decisions based on a 5% chance. We’re also seeing that the people who do get COVID after the vaccine—let’s say you’re one of those unfortunate 5-percenters—it’s going to be a milder case.

- Interview by Nick Tabor

Icon of St. Panteleimon

Byzantine, 15th c. The Pushkin Museum