Various sections of the Northwest medical facility are engaging in COVID-19 clinical trials. Poage’s own emergency room team is part of a national double-blinded, randomized, controlled clinical trial investigating effective virus treatments.
Poage has been medical director at Northwest Emergency at Town Square since graduating from residency in March 2017. He also serves as an ER physician at Northwest Emergency and still finds time to work as a professor at Texas Tech University.
Personal protective equipment, or PPE, is more important than ever in protecting medical personnel from contracting the virus and keeping health care workers safe so they may continue helping others.
The pandemic through an emergency room doctor’s eyes
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STORY BY CHRISTINE BROUSSARD ’10 / PHOTOS BY ADRIENNE NEIMAN
HOUGH NORMALLY A blur of chaotic movement, the emergency room of Amarillo’s Northwest Emergency at Town Square has, in recent days, become noticeably quieter. For Dr. Frederick Poage ’06, the facility’s medical director, the significant drop in patient visits has been the strangest side effect of the ongoing global pandemic. Out of fear and uncertainty, more patients are pushing the limits on when to seek care for dire medical conditions, and it’s making his job as an ER physician increasingly tricky. “Patients are delaying coming in for emergencies because they are
scared,” Poage said. “I saw a kid who was experiencing abdominal pain for a week end up having severe appendicitis, requiring surgery and hospitalization to receive IV antibiotics. If his family had brought him in the first or second day, he could have most likely gotten an appendectomy and gone home the same day.” Poage has been one of the many health care workers on the front line in the battle against COVID-19. As an ER physician, medical director and professor at Texas Tech University, he’s in a unique position to witness firsthand the vast array of emotional, local and medical responses to the virus.
While he understands the fears associated with high levels of change and uncertainty, Poage still finds it concerning that people are placing fear over their own health. “A gentleman called one night reporting chest pain but said, ‘I think it’s just indigestion.’ He checked all the boxes for a heart attack, so I advised him to come in immediately,” Poage said. “He said his wife has stage 4 cancer, and he was scared of bringing COVID-19 back home to her. He finally showed up at 4 a.m. having a full-blown heart attack. Thankfully, we were able to get him to the cath lab immediately for three cardiac stents, but this sort of delay has been the strangest part to me.”
SAWDUST / FALL 2020
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