Words from a physician about COVID-19

The following words were written by Dr. Kimberly Rengel, an anesthesiologist with family ties to CoxHealth, and were originally posted on her Facebook page. We share them with permission here. Please take her words to heart.

Friends – I interrupt your regularly scheduled adorable baby programming because I’m on the verge of breaking, I am exhausted, and I need your help.

I have remained relatively quiet on social media about COVID-19. I am extremely averse to conflict and sensitive to people’s opinions of me and I honestly didn’t have the energy to stir up any hard feelings or backlash. I write today for anyone who might see this and is on the fence about a COVID vaccine, for anyone who is scared about saying something to a loved one who won’t get vaccinated, for anyone who needs to know they aren’t alone in their desperation that this will never end. I come to you today first and foremost as a friend or family member and ask you very humbly to just listen and consider…

I have fielded countless calls over the past 15 years from friends and family with health related questions. Maybe you are one that has called me or maybe you have reached out to another trusted healthcare worker. And we drop everything to look at a picture of a rash, listen to you describe your symptoms, weigh out weather you should go to the ER or your family doctor, and try to help explain something your doctor might have said that you don’t understand. You have reached out to me in trust and confidence for me to share my knowledge with you and I am now BEGGING you to bring the same trust and confidence in my knowledge to this conversation. The COVID-19 vaccine is safe and effective and will save countless lives. It’s why 96% of all physicians in America are vaccinated. And we are now seeing every day that it works as 95%+ of the COVID patients in our hospitals and ICUs impacted by this latest surge are unvaccinated.

If you have ever run into my parents to catch up in store and my name comes up in conversation and you have said to them – “You must be so proud of her” – I beg you to think about what made you say that? I hope it is because you recognize the immense amount of training and pressure that goes into this journey, the days on end without sleep, the time away from family and home, and the sheer number of hours spent studying and caring for patients. I did not put in all this dedication and hard work and effort just to lead you astray. To ask you to do something that would harm you. I want more than anything to protect you and your family and everyone else around us so we can get back to a normal life. So we don’t have to turn away sick patients because there aren’t any more beds in our hospitals and so I don’t walk into work each day wondering how many more preventable deaths I will witness today.

Lastly, I may have tugged at your heart strings in the past few months with pictures of this adorable baby boy I am so blessed to call my son. I come before you as his mom, begging you to help me protect my child. If I could get him a vaccine, I would have signed up yesterday. But he is too young and will probably not reach an approved age group for months. And so I live in fear. I worry every day that today will be the day I contract COVID-19 at work and bring it home to him. I have nightmares about sitting at his bedside in an ICU while he struggles to breathe. I keep him as close to home as possible but with the delta variant now potentially infecting the vaccinated with high viral loads, I am back to worrying every day if this is the day that my choice to be a doctor kills my son. If your biggest reason for not getting vaccinated is that you don’t think COVID will affect you because you are young and healthy with no other diseases, then please consider doing it for my baby. For your children. For the elderly person next door who might not mount an immune response even with a vaccine. For the woman who received a heart transplant and has to take handfuls of pills every day to keep her immune system suppressed so her body won’t attack the heart that wasn’t originally hers, and therefore won’t fight off a COVID infection even with the vaccine.

I became a doctor because I wanted to heal, to help people, to make the world a better place. Most of us who went into medicine have the same goals. And we are broken from watching bodies pile up around us, lost to a preventable disease. We can’t do this alone. Now is your chance to help, to make the world a better place. Please get a vaccine. Please speak up. Please.