Rediscovering Community—Reflections After Hurricane Sandy

Dr. See gives a wonderful example of using her expertise and community membership to create an urgently needed service for people around her in a moment of crisis. Her mentioning of a patient with COPD reminded me of our own experience during the Sandy storm.

Our Family Practice Center in the East Village in New York City was out of power and our residents were displaced for 7 days. Volunteering on day 2 post-Sandy in the hospital, the Family Medicine team was asked to admit 28 patients in the span of 8 hours.

Together with a third year resident I was assigned to take over the cardio-thoracic post-operative unit. As we came into the 10 bed ICU ward, I looked at the multiple monitors at each bedside with wave-forms long forgotten and wondered whether we were the right people for the job. But then it turned out that our 10 customers had different trajectories. Elective heart surgery had been suspended and this was another population occupying the cubicles. One woman with oxygen-dependent COPD who suddenly found herself on the 18th floor in her building in the dark with her oxygen concentrator non-functioning. Another woman with a similar story was accompanied by her husband. He had no medical issues other than dementia, but his wife was his sole caregiver and she could not leave him behind in the dark. Another woman with COPD was dehydrated. She lived on the 20+ floor of a high-rise building and her immobility, combined with the osteoarthritis of her son-in-law, prevented them from carrying a sufficient amount of water to their shared apartment in a given day for the three cohabitants to have sufficient fluids.

In a city with an excellent infrastructure that allows people with a wide variety of disabilities to manage independently, the sudden lack of power and water created a population of vulnerable people that could have easily fallen through the cracks. People like Dr. See who volunteered to knock at doors and helped identify the need prevented a worse impact of this disaster.

Competing interests: None declared