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Top NYC ER doctor commits suicide shaken by coronavirus onslaught

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Dr. Lorna Breen suicide
Dr. Lorna Breen suicide
Dr. Lorna Breen suicide
Dr. Lorna Breen suicide

Dr. Lorna Breen suicide: Manhattan ER doctor at NewYork-Presbyterian Allen Hospital kills self during frontline coronavirus work.

The casualties of battle…

The head of the emergency department at a Manhattan hospital committed suicide on Sunday after days of working the front lines of NYC‘s coronavirus pandemic, her family revealed on Monday.

‘She tried to do her job, and it killed her,’ Dr. Philip Breen told the nytimes of his physician daughter, Dr. Lorna Breen, who had been medical director of the NewYork-Presbyterian Allen Hospital amid the pandemic.

In the days leading up to her death, the 48-year-old battle weary ER doctor reportedly recounted to family members a series of traumatic scenes she’d witnessed working in the Manhattan hospital, including an onslaught of patients dying in front of her before they could even be removed from ambulances.

Dr. Lorna Breen’s suicide comes as the latest healthcare worker to take their own life- with NYC in recent weeks becoming the United State’s epicenter of coronavirus contractions and deaths. 

Two days earlier, a Bronx EMT witnessing the virus’s dramatically rising toll fatally shot himself with a gun belonging to his retired NYPD cop dad.

John Mondello, 23, rookie paramedic worked out of EMS Station 18 in The Bronx, which handles one of the biggest 911 call volumes in the city.

Lorna died Sunday in Charlottesville, Va., where she’d been staying with her family, the father told the Times.

Philip Breen said his daughter had gotten sick with the virus while on the job at one point, but then returned to work after about a week and a half of recuperating. Still, the hospital sent her home again, and her family brought her to Virginia.

She had no history of mental illness, he said. But when they last spoke, she told him how excruciating it was to have to continually watch contagion patients die and be powerless not to be able to save them. 

‘She was truly in the trenches on the front line,’ Philip Breen told the Times.

‘Make sure she’s praised as a hero,’ the father added. ‘She’s a casualty just as much as anyone else who has died.’

Mental-health professionals say PTSD from the pandemic is becoming a very real crisis reports the nypost.

‘The group that is most at risk are the front-line health care workers, as well as the people who lost loved ones’, said Stanford University Professor Debra Kaysen, head of the school’s International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. 

An ICU doctor who works in the city said that the onslaught of virus patients can be almost too much to handle for anyone at times.

For a while, ‘it felt like we were standing under a waterfall and couldn’t get a breath for air,’ she said. ‘Now it feels busy but not in a way that’s suffocating.’

‘I was in a really low place. But I feel hopeful that I’m starting to come out of it, finally.’

Still, ‘It’s just very depressing because people in the ICU aren’t really coming out of it, and I don’t think my patients are going to live,’ the doctor added.

She admitted that she has mixed feelings about the people who clap outside her hospital and others to honor healthcare workers during the pandemic.

‘The clappers make me cry whenever I hear them,’ she said. ‘But also it’s weird — because none of us feel like heroes because we feel so defeated by this disease.’

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline’s phone number is 1-800-273-8255.

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