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ost Americans alive today list the 9/11 terrorist attacks as a watershed moment. Many draw inspirations from that tragedy to help others. Paul Lynch, MD, is one of those people. As a fourth-year medical student at New York University, he saw the iconic twin towers fall in lower Manhattan. Paul went to Ground Zero to care for the wounded but learned all patients were being taken to St Vincent’s Hospital. Since few survived, the hospital told him there was not much he could do. It took Paul years to process his experience of seeing the loss of human life and feeling paralyzed to assist. Yet, that traumatic experience instilled in Paul a commitment to care for patients. Fast forward 19 years and a new national tragedy has befallen our country. The COVID-19 pandemic has crippled our many resources, our economy and most importantly killed over 132,000 people. That didn’t stop Dr. Lynch, now a Scottsdale-based pain intervention physician and anesthesiologist, to temporarily leave his successful practice Arizona Pain Specialists in March and head back to New 16
ARIZONA PHYSICIAN | Summer 2020
York City to volunteer at Bellevue Hospital, America’s oldest hospital and where he had trained. His former colleagues reached out asking for help and reinforcements. Jumping at the chance to help, his volunteer application was approved, and Dr. Lynch received an emergency license in New York.
New York City during the crisis The conditions at Bellevue were not for the faint of heart. The first thing he saw were bodies being put on trucks. “Not just one or two, but 20 trucks in a row, semi-trucks with long trailers. The city had nowhere to put the deceased,” says Dr. Lynch. On the first day he arrived in early April, NYC lost 3,000 people. It was like 9/11 happening each day for the first three days after he arrived. Dr. Lynch was immediately trained and added to an airway team. On his first day, a 12-hour shift, they intubated 10 patients. That is ten times the average he had experienced on anesthesia teams over a week! They airway team went room to room and floor to floor to intubate patients.
