“It was the night I lost a patient who I thought would survive and shared a terminal diagnosis with a man not much older than myself. I hadn’t stopped to eat, drink, or use the bathroom in over eight hours, and by the end I was exhausted. It was a difficult night but not unusual except for one thing: I felt nothing. I struggled to rally the passion I had once felt as an emergency physician. I wondered how long I could continue.”
Heather Patterson was already burnt out working as an emergency physician, and then COVID-19 hit her Calgary emergency room. Thrust into ground zero of a global crisis, Patterson began to chronicle what she saw, photographing her colleagues and patients to show the real impact of the pandemic.