AL Physician Dr. Brytney Cobia, MD: “I hold their hand and tell them ‘I’m sorry, but it’s too late.'”
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Saturday, July 24, 2021
“I’m admitting young healthy people to the hospital with very serious COVID infections. One of the last things they do before they’re intubated is beg me for the vaccine. I hold their hand and tell them that ‘I’m sorry, but it’s too late’.
“A few days later when I call time of death, I hug their family members and I tell them the best way to honor their loved one is to go get vaccinated and encourage everyone they know to do the same.
“They cry. And they tell me they didn’t know. They thought it was a hoax. They thought it was political. They thought because they had a certain blood type or a certain skin color they wouldn’t get as sick. They thought it was ‘just the flu.’
“So they thank me and they go get the vaccine. And I go back to my office, write their death note, and say a small prayer that this loss will save more lives.
Dr. Brytney Cobia, MD is a Hospitalist at Grandview Medical Center in Birmingham, AL.
“You kind of go into it thinking, ‘Okay, I’m not going to feel bad for this person, because they make their own choice.’ But then you actually see them, you see them face to face, and it really changes your whole perspective, because they’re still just a person that thinks that they made the best decision that they could with the information that they have, and all the misinformation that’s out there.
“And now all you really see is their fear and their regret. And even though I may walk into the room thinking, ‘Okay, this is your fault, you did this to yourself,’ when I leave the room, I just see a person that’s really suffering, and that is so regretful for the choice that they made.
“It’s really hard because all of us physicians and other medical staff, we’ve been doing this for a long time and all of us are very, at this point, tired and emotionally drained and cynical.
“What we saw in December 2020, and January 2021, that was the absolute peak, the height of the pandemic, where I was signing 10 death certificates a day. Now, it’s certainly not like that, but it’s very reminiscent of probably October, November of 2020, where we know there’s a lot of big things coming up.
“All these kids are about to go back to school. No mask mandates are in place at all, 70% of Alabama is unvaccinated. Of course, no kids are vaccinated, for the most part, because they can’t be. So it feels like impending doom, basically.
“I try to be very non-judgmental when I’m getting a new COVID patient that’s unvaccinated, but I really just started asking them, ‘Why haven’t you gotten the vaccine?’ And I’ll just ask it point blank, in the least judgmental way possible. And most of them – they’re very honest – they give me answers. ‘I talked to this person, I saw this thing on Facebook, I got this email, I saw this on the news,’ you know, ‘these are all the reasons that I didn’t get vaccinated.’
“And the one question that I always ask them is, ‘Did you make an appointment with your primary care doctor and ask them for their opinion on whether or not you should receive the vaccine?’ And so far, nobody has answered ‘yes’ to that question.”
— Dr. Brytney Cobia, MD, hospitalist at Grandview Medical Center, Birmingham, AL, Facebook post Sunday, 18 July 2021
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