Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on April 29, 2020

A call went out for volunteers, and I answered. I wrote this on Friday, the day after my first shift at Boston Hope, a 1,000-bed field hospital built this month at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center to treat COVID-19 patients.

Ive been asked, Why would you do that? Youre turning 60, you live in beautiful Maine, with a loving family. Are you scared youre going to get infected? You bet Im scared, just like everyone else. But my answer remains simple. Its a calling, something I signed up for a long time ago. As the Talmud asks: If not you, then who? If not now, then when?

I was concerned that when I arrived to work, I would smell this deadly contagious virus, but it was just the opposite. Like the anxiety that crept up the night before my first shift, the virus is insidious.

But those infected are not. What I witnessed was patients who are survivors and who cherished those who treated them.

Lets celebrate and give thanks to all of those on the front line: health care workers, police and firefighters, supermarket workers, and those who clean the hospital rooms and empty the trash. My hat goes off to them. These workers are the angels, the heroes, not me. They do it day in and day out.

They dont complain. They remind me that this will pass. But, as the military slogan, which is strung up outside the Boston Hope command center, says, they just keep pounding.

Dr. Gary Perlmutter

Cumberland, Maine

See the article here:

Maine doctor answered the call to help at Boston field hospital - The Boston Globe

Category: Talmud
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