Craig Spencer MD MPH Profile picture
Nov 29, 2020 7 tweets 4 min read Read on X
As COVID19 surges across the US, it’s hard to describe the situation inside hospitals for healthcare providers & patients.

We made this video depicting 1 day in the ER to show the painful reality & to remind us why we must remain vigilant. Please watch.
We also made a version in French:

And a version with Spanish subtitles:

And again, so many thanks to @IsabeauD_ & the entire team at @ajplus for supporting this: @katmhayes, @jonlaurence, Momin Bannani, @HassanManasarh, Mohammed Kakhi, Eslam Amin & Hamza Tebai, Nanako Pierce.

Here’s a YouTube for sharing on other platforms:
And a version with Arabic subtitles

يوم من حياة طبيب من مدينة نيويورك حارب وباء إيبولا والآن هو في الخطوط الأمامية لمواجهة كورونا (كوفيد-19).

Dr. Craig Spencer kämpfte und überlebte Ebola. Als Arzt in NYC kämpft er jetzt gegen # COVID19. Hier ist sein Alltag (mit deutschen Untertiteln von @NeidhardtAndrea):

And in Portuguese:

Chegamos a mais de 1.7 milhões mortos pela covid-19 no mundo. Ainda que o governo brasileiro deboche da doença, os profissionais de saúde estão lutando para evitar que tudo seja ainda pior.

“Um dia na emergência combatendo a covid-19”

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More from @Craig_A_Spencer

May 12
I can’t stop thinking of a baby girl I treated, just minutes after grenade shrapnel tore through her brain…🧵
I was in Burundi working as a trauma doctor in 2016.

Civil conflict enveloped the country. I was training local physicians to treat and stabilize life-threatening injuries.

Most of our patients had gunshot wounds

or had been pierced by grenade shrapnel

Sometimes both.
When violence erupted, we’d hear a furious bang at the hospital entrance

the large doors would open

then 60-70 people wound stream in, some walking, some carried.

Many bleeding. Some already dead.

We’d start to triage. We had trained for this. We had a system.
Read 12 tweets
Mar 31
Four years ago today, I walked into the apocalypse.

Crossing the line in the ER felt like entering a whole other world.

Frenetic alarms.

Patients strewn about, struggling to breathe.

Too few staff. Too many deaths.

Covid was everything.

It had completely taken over our ER
Covid inundated NYC a week prior.

And many of our staff fell ill.

Especially the nurses.

We had only a fraction of those we needed.

Too few to notice when the oxygen tanks under patients’ beds ran out.

So we did something kinda insane.

Actually unbelievable
We ran tubing from the oxygen outlets on the wall

up, up, up

then through the ceiling

and then dangled it down to the middle of the ER

All over the ER

So everyone could get a reliable oxygen supply

And not suffocate when their tank ran out

It saved lives.

A lot.

A lot.
Read 9 tweets
Mar 20
How much do you know about food and drug safety?

Where did our current regulations come from?

And what were some of the greatest scandals that forced change?

We covered everything from swill milk, patent medicines, and thalidomide in our class today.

Here's what we covered 🧵 Image
We started with smill milk.

This was a massive problem that few—including in public health—have ever heard of.

In New York (and elsewhere) in the mid-19th century, milk was a big part of the daily diet, especially for children.

But people didn't realize how deadly it was.
Image
Image
Usually marketed as 'pure milk' with depictions of happy cows and happy kids, the reality was WAY different.

A lot of milk—estimates are 60-80% of ALL milk at the time—was actually 'swill milk'.

Swill milk came from cows fed solely on a diet of distillery slop (aka 'swill').
Image
Image
Read 52 tweets
Mar 14
Hey my medicine and public health people!

How much do you know about eugenics?

Just old pseudoscience, you say?

Any idea how much it continues to influence us?

Answer: A LOT.

I taught a class on the history of eugenics and public health today. Here's what we covered: 🧵 Image
Eugenics is Greek for 'well-born'. But it wasn't coined by the Greeks. It's a late 19th century term made up by Francis Galton. He LOVED data. We will come back to that.

Eugenics had the biggest impact on the approach to mental illness, immigration, and reproductive justice. Image
We will dig into each.

But first, you gotta know the background and key players.

For background, eugenics arose in an environment obsessed with progress, but also frustrated with economic and social realities.
Read 44 tweets
Oct 21, 2023
Having worked in conflict zones, I want to share a bit on humanitarian response in Gaza, as aid starts to trickle in.

This isn’t a thread on how to end the war, or hostages, or any of the other very important things. Those are critical too. But they’re not at all my expertise 🧵
Over the past week, shortages in food, water, and electricity have exacerbated the humanitarian and health challenges.

This creates new problems, as well as worsening chronic issues.

Without gas, generators can’t run. Newborns on life support in intensive care can’t survive.
Without electricity, patients can’t receive dialysis. Insulin for diabetes can’t be kept refrigerated, as it should be. These chronic health issues worsen, quickly.

Without water, infectious diseases like cholera (and others) become increasingly likely.

cnn.com/2023/10/18/mid…
Read 12 tweets
Sep 20, 2023
Today I spoke in a colleague’s class about the COVID-19 pandemic.

He asked me to talk about what it was like in NYC’s emergency rooms in March and April 2020. Seemed easy enough.

But revisiting the trauma was really hard and painful.

I’m still not sure we’ve fully processed.
It really hit me when I described how we strung oxygen tubing from the wall outlets up through the ceiling so it reached patients in the middle of the ER who were suffocating when the canisters under their bed ran out…

We all normalized something that just wasn’t normal, at all
It had been years since I thought about how my colleague avoided my gaze as I examined her.

Struggling to breathe, she was looking over my shoulder as her mother was intubated across the emergency room.

It seemed so routine then.

But retelling it today felt so sad, surreal.
Read 4 tweets

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