7. Follow up. If you can’t view the results of your bloodwork online, ask for a copy so you can review and share with other healthcare providers if necessary. Ideally, your doctor should call you to discuss the results, especially if they include any alarming numbers (often flagged in red on your results, helping patients to detect possible problems). If your doctor doesn’t call, feel empowered to call his or her office. After all, it’s your time, your money, and most important, your life.
If you learn you have a chronic condition, especially one like diabetes that will make you more vulnerable to COVID-19:
Don’t freak out. Chronic conditions are common. What matters most is that you found the problem and are now going to do something to address it.
Schedule a follow-up appointment with your doctor or a specialist. Never try to treat yourself with Google Search. Medical misinformation is as prolific online as computer cookies. It’s important to discuss your condition with a trained healthcare provider who can help you make informed decisions about how to best treat the ailment.
Focus on food and fitness. You may not get a prescription to eat less sugar and move more, but diet and exercise are just as important as prescription drugs, if not more so, in reducing the symptoms and presence of most chronic diseases. A majority of chronic conditions, including type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure, are reversible through food and fitness.
Prioritize adding, not subtracting. Many chronic conditions can be addressed by changing your diet. If you’re diagnosed with high blood pressure, for example, your doc will likely ask you to reduce your intake of high-sodium foods. But I like to remind my patients with hypertension that they can also eat more high-potassium foods (like broccoli, watermelon, and avocados). Focusing on what you can eat, not what you can’t eat, can help you better adhere to a new nutritional plan.
Cut down on alcohol and stress. There’s no chronic condition that benefits from too much booze or stress, period. Both increase inflammation and can cause a disease to develop in the first place. While alcohol intake has become more prodigious during the pandemic, all that beer, wine, and liquor is hurting, not helping, your ability to get through tough times, no matter what you may think. Similarly, while stress levels can redline during a pandemic, you can still learn how to keep your anxiety under control. For more on how to deal with alcohol and stress, read chapter 2: Mind.
In the new normal, what you do with your body matters more than ever before. You have an amazing opportunity right now to use COVID-19 as your wake-up call to get as physically healthy as possible, not only for this pandemic but also for the next one down the road. I know it’s not easy working on your health, especially if you’re suffering from more than one chronic condition. But whether our world is facing another outbreak, you get diagnosed with another condition later in life, you feel anxious, stressed, or depressed, or you simply want to be able to do all the things you love with the people you love for the longest amount of time, improving your body is one of the best ways to become more resilient.
Chapter 2
Mind
At the beginning of the pandemic, when we still believed the coronavirus was largely contained to Wuhan, China, Dr. Anthony Fauci stated that the risk to the American public was low. In the national and local media, we repeated that belief.
And it was—at the time. Many health experts, myself included, thought it was inconceivable that what was happening in China would ever happen here. We erroneously believed that the United States was better prepared, at least medically, and that while the virus would certainly come to the States, it wouldn’t impact America as severely as it had Wuhan.
We were wrong, obviously. As the virus began to spread swiftly throughout Europe and made landfall in the United States, my perception changed, practically overnight. I realized that the United States was in no better shape than China to handle COVID-19, and may have been even more poorly equipped for a global health threat. The situation started to spiral quickly, as I began appearing on air up to fourteen hours a day. After I saw a picture of empty store shelves in Italy with the headline “Coming to New York City Soon,” I went on Amazon to order a month’s supply of sardines, crackers, toilet paper, and other essentials.
At the end of February, news broke that the first American had died from the virus. I was called on a weekend and told to urgently phone into the studio for a special report on ABC News. I told viewers that the United States’ strategy would likely have to shift immediately from one of containment to mitigation. It was like getting a tsunami warning, and while we all wanted to believe the wave would never come, we were now seeing this massive upsurge in the ocean on the horizon—and it was only getting bigger and bigger and closer and closer.
By March, I was reporting around the clock, seven days a week, listening and commenting in real time to every White House Task Force briefing and reading every study, no matter how preliminary, that was published on the virus. The advice seemed to change hour by hour, and the situation was advancing in rapid succession. At first, companies began to close and people started working from home, then New York City shut down, and my two kids came home from college to live with me—not by choice, but because their universities had suddenly shuttered.
My news reports began to take a sobering turn. It was now clear that the United States didn’t have enough masks to protect healthcare workers and that there were also not enough ventilators to protect the lives of all the Americans who might get critically ill. I reported on air as refrigerated trucks started rolling ominously into New York and New Jersey, acting as morgues to hold the growing number of dead as hospitals and funeral homes became overwhelmed. In March, we learned that the studio had a confirmed COVID-19 case. I was notified as someone with whom this person had had prolonged, close contact. Many of us went into self-quarantine, myself included, and I started broadcasting out of my apartment.
In April, we were struck a big blow at ABC: One of our colleagues, Tony Greer, a camera operator for Good Morning America, had died from the virus. I was saddened and horrified. That same week, my brother, also a doctor, was diagnosed with the disease, and five more people I knew personally passed away from the virus, four of them were black.
All of a sudden, I felt like I was in the eye of a perfect storm, reporting on the horrors of the virus at work while those horrors were hitting home. I was waking up at four every morning to cover the coronavirus for hours on end without any physical, mental, or emotional change. It was like being strapped into some awful emotional roller-coaster ride from which I could never get off.
Up until this point, I had been able to keep my personal fears at bay, but now I was scared for my life. If I died from COVID-19, who would take care of my kids? I was the only parent they had. My anxiety and fears began to manifest in my dreams at night. In one dream, I was intubated in the ICU, and my boyfriend, who’s an infectious disease doctor in Boston, rushed to New York to be by my side. When he finally got to my bed, he tried to slip an engagement ring on my senseless finger, but it was too late: I died from COVID-19 the moment the ring sparkled on my hand.
These dreams were just one warning sign that the pandemic had started to affect my mental health. But what could I do? I couldn’t snap my fingers and make the coronavirus go away. And I couldn’t—nor did I want to—stop reporting on the virus and delivering the medical insight that so many had now come to rely upon.
It was then I realized that since I couldn’t change any of my external factors, I had to change something inside me. My doctor brain began to kick in, and I went back to the basics I had learned in med school.
In medicine, we always use facts, not fear, and evidence, not emotions, to guide us through difficult decisions and procedures. I rely on this outlook all the time in my own practice—because while I’m a doctor on TV, I’m not just “a doctor on TV.” I also see patients in real life. And when patients are frightened, whether by unfavorable test results or a grim diagnosis, I acknowledge that f
eeling and then use facts to help them overcome it. I tell patients what I know and the ways in which we can help them. I don’t dwell on what might or could happen—I focus instead on what I know to be happening.
It was now time to apply my own patient process to myself. I had to go back to the facts—my facts. I knew I was healthy, with no underlying medical conditions, and that my risk of dying from the disease at age fifty hovered somewhere around 1 percent. I reminded myself that 80 percent of all cases are mild and don’t require hospitalization. For the next several days, I repeated these numbers over and over to myself.
Less than one week later, my fear and anxiety had ebbed almost completely, and my COVID-19 nightmares had nearly subsided. It was a dramatic shift—and it saved me.
Today, despite all we’ve been through as a country and that I’ve been through personally as a doctor, mother, and daughter of two eighty-year-old parents, my fear and anxiety have never returned to that super-high level. I’ve adapted the best I can, mentally and emotionally, to our new normal. All this is not to say that I’m in denial or can somehow overlook the real problems the pandemic has produced, including widespread unemployment, racial inequity, financial struggle, and a staggering death toll. I couldn’t ever overlook those facts. And those facts do bother me profoundly, every day. But I have learned to apply the advice that my mother, a retired nurse, has reiterated for years: You can’t control what happens. But you can control what you do with what happens.
Remembering my mother’s aphorisms and relying on “facts over fear” are some of the ways that I’ve used self-talk to cope with the anxiety of our new normal. These strategies may help you, too, but there are also countless other ways to deal with the mental and emotional fallout of our new normal. Throughout the pandemic, I’ve discovered, learned, experienced, and recommended new ways to tackle the roller-coaster ride of anxiety, stress, depression, sadness, loneliness, and/or burnout that many of us now face. I’ve seen firsthand how my patients, friends, colleagues, and the viewers I’ve spoken with on air have been able to start to heal from mental hardship. I’ve also read the research, reported on it, and spoken extensively with leading experts about how pervasive mental-health problems are right now—what many psychiatrists now call the world’s “second pandemic.”
If you’re thinking you don’t have any mental-health hardships to contend with, I’d encourage you to reconsider. As I said in the introduction, the pandemic has been too disruptive, terrifying, and traumatic for all of us not to have some degree of post-traumatic stress disorder right now. What’s more, almost everyone has experienced a loss since 2019. Your loss may be obvious—a loved one, your job, your home, or your business—or more subtle, like your freedom to travel, see friends and family with abandon, exercise in a gym, or maintain relationships with those who don’t share your same risk tolerance. But we’ve all endured some kind of loss—and it’s critical to recognize and grieve that loss. If you don’t, you may never get over it, allowing the trauma of the pandemic to haunt you for months to come.
But what’s just as important as healing from our past losses is learning to cope with what we’ve been left with today, which is life in our new normal. Depending on your situation, you may be so stressed with work, family, or financial anxieties that you haven’t even had time to consider how the new normal is impacting you. Conversely, you might live alone and have all the time in the world to think about the trials and tribulations of a new normal. How you feel about our new reality might be subtle, too. Michelle Obama, for example, announced that she was now suffering from a “low-grade depression” due to the pandemic—something that many can probably relate to.
The bottom line is that it’s important to be honest with yourself about how the new normal is affecting you. There are few constants in our lives right now, and that uncertainty isn’t going away—when and if the coronavirus pandemic ends, we always face the possibility of another outbreak. Amid all this change, our emotions are collateral damage. Destabilizing feelings have been with us for many months now—one reason people who have never struggled with mental-health issues are now experiencing them every day. Understanding how the pandemic era is affecting you, mentally and emotionally, can help you address the anxiety and discover a new level of mental health, happiness, and resiliency.
In this chapter, I want to give you as many keys as possible to help you find the one that will unlock a new level of mental health, happiness, and resiliency for you. Using what I know as a doctor and have learned on the front lines of this pandemic from Day One, along with principles I’ve learned from mental-health professionals, I want to show you the ways in which you can accept what you can’t control and control what you can. Wishful thinking won’t return your life to the old normal. Instead, I encourage you to reframe your mindset and accept our new normal so you can face the present—and the future—with optimism and serenity.
This Is What a Second Pandemic Looks Like
You’ve likely seen the statistics and read the headlines. The United States is facing a second pandemic—this time, an outbreak of mental illness—with tens of millions of Americans falling sick from psychological trauma.
The headlines began appearing only weeks after the virus emerged in the United States. In April 2020, nearly half of all Americans said the pandemic was negatively impacting their mental health.1 Calls to federal emergency hotlines for those in emotional distress shot up by 1,000 percent.2 Anxiety and depression became widespread, as researchers estimated half of all Americans were suffering from depressive symptoms.3 Alcohol sales and substance abuse skyrocketed, along with reports of domestic abuse and violence. In May 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned of a “massive increase in mental health issues in the coming months.”4 Doctors began to see spikes in the kind of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) typically associated with war, physical violence, and natural disaster.5
But this was unlike war, destructive hurricanes, 9/11, or other historically traumatic events. The coronavirus pandemic had no discernible enemy. It had no safe zones or areas out of harm’s way. And perhaps worst of all, it had—and has—no end in sight.
This reality, in turn, has caused what researchers have called “life-altering short-term and likely long-term effects” on our mental health.6 Life-altering is a strong word for scientists to use, but it’s not hyperbole. Think about that for a moment.
On an international scale, the pandemic has triggered a new level of fear unlike anything the world has ever seen before, with nearly every person on the planet fearful for his or her life or family’s lives at one point or another. The way the virus has sickened and killed—both prodigiously and indiscriminately—has caused crippling uncertainty, as the realization has sunk in that no one is 100 percent safe.
For me, the universality of this anxiety hit home after many at ABC were exposed to a confirmed COVID-19 case. For the next several weeks, as we self-quarantined, I fielded questions from dozens of colleagues who were worried sick that they had the virus. And I mean really worried. Nearly everyone told me they had chest tightness, which I eventually realized wasn’t due to COVID-19, but to the overwhelming anxiety we were all feeling.
As the pandemic progressed, anxiety over individual survival combined with other concerns. Millions of Americans lost their jobs, creating widespread financial panic, as schools closed, leaving families scrambling to find childcare and keeping older students from following their dreams. Many were forced to work from home, which has produced its own anxieties, and nearly everyone’s daily routine has been disrupted. Almost every outlet, whether you like to travel, dine out, see a show, go to the gym, or even go outside for a walk, has been either stripped away or transformed.
Through it all, many have lost something far greater than the ability to travel or even work a job: They’ve lost a loved one to COVID-19.
Regardless of what any of us has faced or lost, we’ve all had to do it seemingly alone. We’ve experienced lockdown
or stay-at-home orders—and it’s possible that many of us will have to do it again. We’ve been cut off from family, friends, and colleagues. Few have been able to share joy, and almost no one has been able to share pain, with no funerals, family get-togethers, or in-person support groups.
This kind of isolation has sparked an epidemic of loneliness, which psychologists say could take years to recede.7 Not only a mental-health crisis, it’s also a physical-health crisis: Loneliness is known to increase the risk of premature death8 and can be as detrimental to overall health as smoking up to fifteen cigarettes per day.9
The pandemic’s toll has been felt by people of all ages, races, and socioeconomic classes. Yet the effects have been especially detrimental to those who had mental-health issues before the coronavirus crisis struck. Many have deteriorated—and will continue to deteriorate as the pandemic drags on. Rehab centers have also reported a spike in relapses in those dealing with alcohol or drug problems.10
Another sector of the population more prone to mental-health issues is those who have recovered from COVID-19. We now know that the virus can leave some with long-haul COVID-19 syndrome or post-intensive care syndrome (PICS), triggering anxiety, sleep problems, depression, or PTSD.11 Even those who don’t receive intensive care or hadn’t had severe COVID-19 can develop these conditions.12
In other words, we’ve all been affected—some in more ways than others—and the extent of the pandemic’s mental-health impact may take years to overcome.
While it may be comforting to think none of the mental-health problems prompted by the pandemic affects you, everyone has been impacted in one way or another. That’s because every single one of us has lost something. Maybe you lost your job or the career that defined you. Maybe you lost your sense of community, daily routine, ability to travel, or another personal pastime. Maybe you even lost a friend, colleague, or family member to the virus. But we’ve all lost something.
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