As the fight against COVID continues, many doctors are called into action. All over the world doctors are doing everything they can to help people. In St. Louis, doctors are giving out tests daily. One doctor, Dr. Patrick Lyons, Class of 2004, is now doing everything he can to help his patients. 

After graduating in 2004, Lyons remembers SLUH fondly. He remembers some of the friends he’s made, and even keeps in touch with a few. He also remembers the workload throughout his four years.

“I still have a lot of close friends that I made in freshman homeroom and freshman classes, carried all through four years, and even time since then. I’ve kept in touch with a handful of my teachers since then, and I still hold a lot of them as the best educators that I’ve had in terms of challenging me to think critically, challenging me to write effectively, and to always be self-examining and self-reflective,” said Lyons. “I think in a lot of ways I credit my SLUH experience and education with helping form a lot of who I am today as an adult.” 

At SLUH, Lyons learned a lot about working hard and how to manage his time, but he didn’t know what this would lead to until he was in college whilst shadowing doctors and seeing what their jobs were like was when he realized that he wanted to become a doctor. Lyons is thankful for many teachers at SLUH who taught him at a high level, and prepared him for the notoriously difficult medical school, including English teacher Steve Missey, chemistry teacher Charlie Busenhart, AP Physics teacher Paul Baudendistel,  Latin teachers Marie Lee McConaghy and Mark Tyconievich, and Assistant Principal for Academics Tom Becvar.

“(Those teachers) all really taught me at a high level and how to be organized, and prepare myself for challenging course loads and challenging material, and I think that helped set me up for the future,” said Lyons. “I was thinking about it in high school and at some point in college I think that considering going to medical school became less of an idea and more of a sure thing. Some of it was going and shadowing doctors that I had connected with and spending time with them and their patients and seeing what it was like second-hand to see their relationships they’d built with their patients and their patients families. At some point that sensation of  ‘this is what I’m supposed to be doing with my life’ coalesced.” 

After Lyons had decided he would become a doctor he had to decide what he would do. He decided on pulmonary and intensive medicine. He is an intensive care doctor at Barnes Jewish Hospital, although he has only been on the faculty for 10 months. 

“I moved back to St. Louis and did the three and a half year fellowship to specialize in pulmonary medicine, which focuses on lung health, and intensive care medicine, which focuses on patients who are critically ill and need to be in the ICU because they’re on a ventilator or they’re receiving continuous dialysis or continuous blood pressure medication,” said Lyons.

Barnes Jewish Hospital had been expecting patients for a long time, and was ready for them to show up. Not knowing when or how they would show up was the thing that worried some staff members. Lyons had gotten involved fairly recently by helping just one patient. But afterwards he helped more and more once he had been exposed. 

“Every one of my colleagues here in critical care here at Barnes ended up involved, but I found myself as the first person in our dedicated COVID-19 ICU. Based on what was going on nationally we were expecting to see patients in early March, and had identified a specific area of the hospital where we had set up a negative pressure air flow system and had rooms ready for these patients, knowing that they would eventually arrive, but not knowing when specifically,” said Lyons. “It actually happened all of a sudden, in that I was actually running on patients in the regular ICU and a patient arrived and was pretty ill and needed to be intubated urgently and I was the closest person to this dedicated area. They called and asked if I could come quickly and once I did and had that patient intubated and safe on a ventilator I ended up staying and had already been there and knew the patient. So I ended up spending the first few weeks of the pandemic here managing that ICU and all its subsequent patients that came in.” 

Safety is one of the main things to stay focused on when it comes to COVID. Because of how easily it is spread, many people are at risk. Even at Barnes Jewish there have been some staff members who have gotten COVID. Lyons though, did give some tips on what we can do in order to stay safe. 

“I think it's probably four things: one is wearing masks all the time when you’re out in public, two would be to wash your hands more than you think you need to and wash them effectively for more than 20 seconds. Three is really trying to stick to the small gatherings with social and physical distancing, minimizing indoor time with people who are outside of your particular circle. Four is to spread verified information and avoid spreading misinformation. There has been a lot of false information that gets propagated by politicians and people who claim to be in the know by armchair scientists. I think a lot of that has led to dangerous behaviors far and wide, not just in St. Louis, but in the surrounding areas and nationally as well,” said Lyons. 

“At SLUH, they really pride themselves on the ability to understand complex information and think about what we’re learning and what we’re reading, and making sure we interpret that in the most responsible way possible,” continued Lyons. “So I think the big challenge is to try to be stewards of facts and stewards of good information, because the people at SLUH are men and women for others, and so I think we are supposed to be those sorts of leaders in the community.”

At Barnes Jewish Hospital, the doctors have had to take many risks in order to keep their lives and their patients’ lives safe. But with all the risks and bad things that doctors have had to go through, there is some good.

“I’ve had colleagues who have gotten COVID, but thankfully my close colleagues who I know who were sick with it, they all did OK and have recovered and are back at work,” said Lyons. “The good things that I can take away from this, certainly are some lessons learned in terms of leadership, organization, and building an effective culture of trust and safety among people may not even know each other.”

COVID-19 is certainly not over, but it is changing as people learn to adapt to new changes, and medicine is constantly fighting it. People have also learned a lot about themselves in the past few months after being in quarantine. But most importantly, people have learned a lot about COVID and how it affects their lives. 

“The two things that I’ve learned about this, so far, is that there's a lot of uncertainty about what the future will hold in general. And two, is that there seems to be a lot of heterogeneity in time and space. Meaning that, I think the COVID situation will look different for different parts of the country and world and different times. We’ve certainly seen that there can be local and regional outbreaks in one area while another area seems to be, at least somewhat improving. I think we should be prepared for more of  that throughout the winter and probably the spring, until there's an effective vaccine.” 

Art: Charlie Bieg