Healthcare award winner values lessons learned from the pandemic

By RANDY CAPPS

Part of the nomination for Dr. Octavio Cieza, who specializes in infectious diseases in the UNC Health Johnston system, was written by a nurse who works with him and reads as follows: “Dr. Cieza is kind, caring, intelligent and works hard to collaborate with staff daily to treat his patients individually to meet their needs. I cannot recommend a better provider to uplift in our community.”

That’s why Dr. Cieza is this year’s choice for the Johnston Now Honors Best Healthcare Professional Award.

”I did not expect it,” he said. “I’m going to thank her again.”

Dr. Cieza is a native of Peru, and a graduate of the National University of San Marcos in Lima. It was there that the idea of practicing medicine in the U.S. was born.

“It was the way of destiny to come (here),” he said. “When I was in medical school, there was a medical mission team from Ohio that came to Lima. I had the time to meet them, and it kind of was a link (to the United States). It was a very long journey to make. You finish medical school, then you have to take the boards. Passing the medical boards was not really that hard, but the language is the main barrier.”

He learned English while in medical school, had a residency in Ohio and the University of Illinois-Chicago for six years, had a year of HIV training in Houston and spent some time practicing in an underserved community in Barnwell, S.C., before moving to Johnston County in 2007.

With many other options available, Dr. Cieza decided to concentrate on infectious diseases.

“My answer was simple,” he said. “When you’re doing your internal medicine and you’re about to finish, that’s when you choose. … There was a report at the time that the happiest doctors worked in infectious diseases. It said specifically, ‘you will not be rich, but you will be happy.’ To me, that made sense. I’m not here to make money. I wanted to be happy and fulfilled. I do not regret it.”

The field of study covers plenty of ground.

“It’s nothing fancy,” he said. “It’s not just sexually transmitted diseases. It’s COVID, monkeypox, tuberculosis, hepatitis, bone infections, obesity with poorly controlled diabetes — we have many conditions that make you have serious infections we need to treat.”

The pandemic was a trying time for everyone, especially those working in healthcare.

“For COVID, we were really, really busy,” he said. “We were dealing with some shortcomings from the government. We could have done better in many ways. But we survived. But we all lost. I don’t know any family that wasn’t touched by COVID. But we made it.

“We had one of the best survival rates in the state. All of the hospital units were full. We didn’t sleep. I got maybe one or two hours at a time.”

He believes that COVID provided a couple of valuable lessons.

“We learned that information that you get can be very dangerous if it comes from the wrong place,” he said. “We lost a lot of patients because of bad information. Anti-vaccine and all those things. … The other thing we learned is that we really have to work as a team. The whole community, the whole hospital, everybody pitched in to help.”

Treating HIV patients has always been a priority for Dr. Cieza, and he says that treating it has come a long way during his career.

“HIV treatment has been one of my specialties,” he said. “HIV is one of those conditions that sounds bad in the community, but the medicines and the government funding for research, it has improved many things. HIV treatment is easy these days. Literally, patients take one little pill a day, and the survival rate is better than diabetes, better than high blood pressure.”

The smile on his face as he shared that fact lends credence to the report he read back in medical school. Maybe infectious disease doctors are just happier.