| Summary: | Last August, Dr. Scott Jolley came home at 3 am from a busy emergency room shift looking pale, far older than his 55 years. It was the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, and he had been the only physician on duty at his hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah. One of his patients had gone into cardiac arrest after Jolley removed his personal protective equipment to meet his next patient. Jolley, athletic with dusty brown hair, had to frantically gown up and run back to perform a resuscitation. The patient survived, but Jolley felt agitated. When Jolley’s wife, Jackie, woke up at 6, she found him at their kitchen table, hunched over and unable to sleep. He was worrying that in his hurry, he hadn’t put on his PPE correctly, that he might expose Jackie and their three daughters to the coronavirus. He was also mortified about what he’d muttered to himself as he left the patient’s room: “I can’t take this anymore; this is not good for me.” Jackie wasn’t used to seeing her husband in distress. His friends called him “the patriarch.” He was the one everyone else turned to: the kind of guy who talked his way into the ICU to support his daughter after a birth complication, who organized an elaborate fly-fishing trip for the birthday of a friend’s child. Over his 28 years as a doctor, Jolley brought the same attention to detail and compassion to thousands of patients who came into his ER. But as he settled into his 50s, the pace and pressure of the job became unbearable. He began having conflicts with colleagues, who at one point organized a meeting to request Jolley get his anger under control. In 2018, Jolley started thinking about a path to retirement and repeatedly asked his managers at Utah Emergency Physicians - a physician group that contracts with hospitals in the Intermountain Healthcare system, where he worked - for ways to wind down his schedule. With the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic, however, Jolley had to speed up. He was often given... |