ER doctor who treated coronavirus patients dies by suicide

A top emergency room doctor at a Manhattan hospital that treated many coronavirus patients died by suicide on Sunday, her father and the police said.

Dr. Lorna M. Breen, the medical director of the emergency department at NewYork-Presbyterian Allen Hospital, died in Charlottesville, Va., where she was staying with family, her father said in an interview.

Dr. Lorna Breen, 49, died a hero, said her father, Philip Breen. “She was in the trenches,” he said. “She was a hero.” Lorna Breen died Sunday morning by suicide in Charlottesville, Virginia, her father said.

Breen worked in the Columbia University Irving Medical Center and New York-Presbyterian hospital system. ‘Killed by the enemy on the front line,’ father says “She went down in the trenches and was killed by the enemy on the front line,” Philip Breen said. “She loved New York and wouldn’t hear about living anywhere else. She loved her coworkers and did what she could for them.”
“I just want people to know how special she was,” he added.

Philip Breen is a retired trauma surgeon, and he and his daughter would speak frequently about work, he said.

Lorna Breen told her father that her colleagues were putting in 18-hour days and sleeping in hallways, and that ambulances couldn’t get in because it was so busy.

She worked in the emergency department and had been on the front lines for weeks, handling the onslaught of cases, her father said. New York City has been the US’ pandemic epicenter, recording nearly 300,000 cases and more than 22,000 deaths as of Tuesday morning.

Breen contracted Covid-19 and took a week and a half off to recover, but when she went back to work, she couldn’t last through a 12-hour shift, her father said. Still, she felt like she had to get back in there to help her colleagues.

Then, a doctor friend visited Breen at home and told her she should go home to Virginia, where most of her family is based, Philip Breen said. Some friends and relatives helped get her to Charlottesville.

Lorna Breen soon was admitted to the hospital at the University of Virginia for exhaustion, her father said, adding that her mother is a doctor in the ward where she was treated.

After about a week, Lorna Breen left the hospital to stay with her mom, her father said. Then, last weekend, she went to stay with her sister, and that is where she died.

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