Former Tech athletes, cheerleaders, and trainers taking on COVID-19

BLACKSBURG – Dr. Ashleigh Keats Clickett desperately hoped for the best when, a couple of months ago, one of her patients – a young woman who was eight months pregnant – took a test for the COVID-19 disease.
 
An obstetrician and gynecologist in Huntington, West Virginia, the former Virginia Tech track and field athlete certainly understood the reality of today's pandemic. The disease spreads quickly, shows no mercy to the elderly or those with pre-existing conditions, and can cause significant problems among certain young people. Biomedical researchers and others in the medical profession continue a relentless pursuit of a cure or a vaccine.
 
Unfortunately, the young woman tested positive for the virus – she worked at a nursing home where there was an outbreak. But the story ended positively, as she gave birth to a healthy daughter, and everyone appears to be doing well, though not before creating weeks of worry for Clickett.
 
"She ended up having it [COVID-19], but ended up doing fine," Clickett said. "It was no problem. She really didn't have many symptoms. So it's definitely been a learning curve as far as how this virus acts, what patients get sick from it, what don't, how many people are getting it — it's been all new.
 
"She had the baby, and everything turned out great. But it's been a little bit scary and a little bit eye-opening as far as how scary things can get — and we have no way to control it, other than the social distancing and keeping our hands clean and that sort of thing. It makes you wonder if it could ever get worse, or if something worse than this could come up. What would we do?"
 
These are the types of questions that all doctors continue to ask themselves. Fortunately, those educated at the Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine – VCOM, for short – in Virginia Tech's Corporate Research Center feel equipped, and more importantly, motivated to face such challenges.
 
That contingent includes nearly 25 former Virginia Tech student-athletes, cheerleaders, and trainers who matriculated to VCOM after receiving their undergraduate degrees from Virginia Tech and either have graduated or are in the process of graduating from VCOM. VCOM and Virginia Tech share in a public-private venture, pooling resources for research and the educating of future doctors – many of whom go on to practice in rural or underserved areas.  
 
For example, Clickett works at a practice in Huntington, a town of less than 50,000 people. Dr. Scott King, a former football player, spent the past five years in Charleston, West Virginia working a residency in urology at Charleston Area Medical Center before recently completing that residency and joining a practice in Okatie, South Carolina near Hilton Head. Dr. Spencer Harris, a former baseball player, practices family medicine in his hometown of Louisa, Kentucky – a town of 2,500 people not far from Huntington.
 
Practicing in these types of underserved areas presents challenges in and of themselves. A COVID-19 pandemic only adds to it.
 
Not that this group shies away from such tasks, however.
 
"The heart and the motive behind why people get into medicine and nursing and other ancillary services is still good and true," King said. "So this is just an opportunity for trial by fire in terms of why you do this. It brings to the forefront of our minds to sacrifice to help someone … It reminds you that this is a job, and you're caring for sick individuals and this is a scary situation, but it's what we decided to do.
 
"Virginia Tech and VCOM, their whole existence is built upon serving communities in need. When you approach life in a manner of service, you can't back away from the challenges that we're facing through all this."
 
TAKING ON CHALLENGES – BOTH SEEN AND UNFORESEEN
Each of the Virginia Tech "contingent" interviewed for this story told of the challenges that they faced in great detail – and nearly all of those were different. Some found themselves highly exposed to the disease, while others dealt with the secondary effects of it.
 
Dr. Chris Diaz, a former Virginia Tech wrestler who graduated from the university in 2012 and from VCOM in 2017, has spent the past three years working as a resident at Carolinas Medical Center (CMC) in Charlotte, North Carolina – one of the largest hospitals in the state. Diaz specializes in internal medicine in which he diagnoses and treats internal diseases and illnesses, mostly in adults.
 
Diaz said he wasn't quite on the front line of the pandemic, but he wasn't far from it. His risk only increased when smaller, outlying hospitals and medical centers in Southwest North Carolina started sending COVID-19 patients to CMC, which possesses more resources and staff to treat those with the disease. CMC actually created a separate intensive care unit for COVID-19 patients.
 
"At the end of March is when I first got pulled in," Diaz said. "They were trying to hold off on bringing people into the hospital, so that we didn't have as much exposure, and I didn't have any direct contact at first. But later on, I was moved to the ICU [intensive care unit], and more specifically, the cardiac ICU. They usually try to keep the COVID patients away from that area because they're sicker in general and potentially immune-compromised if they're in line for a heart transplant.
 
"In general, they've been able to keep me away from the COVID patients, but still being in a hospital, you're around others that are dealing with the coronavirus patients. Just being in a hospital, you're more exposed. I think I've had less direct exposure, but still indirectly just being in the hospital."
 
Like any doctors, Diaz worries about exposing his family to the disease – and in particular, his 10-month-old daughter. In looking at the data, children and young people appear to be the least at risk, which eases the minds of doctors with younger children.
 
Yet no doctor wants to put their family at risk, especially those with infants.
 
"Overall, we've done, at least within our system, a good job of isolating people that don't need to be exposed, and I've felt pretty secure where I'm at," Diaz said. "I can only control so much, and if I was to be around it, there is a sense of security in knowing that there is only so much I can control in the matter. All I can do are the precautions that are set in place."
 
For Clickett and King, the biggest impact of COVID-19 has been in the volume of their caseloads and how they go about treating patients. The pandemic forced the cancelations of most elective surgeries to preserve resources – namely, personal protective equipment (PPE), which consists of clothing, helmets, goggles, masks, and other garments designed to protect caregivers from infection. Thus, most hospitals and practices only permitted emergency surgeries.
 
Also, most hospitals and practices canceled or curtailed any elective services – regular appointments, checkups, etc. Doctors, though, refused to ignore their patients, coming up with creative ways to provide services.
 
"We moved into this telemedicine phase where we did a lot of over-the-phone consults on things that didn't need to be seen in the office," Clickett said. "So that was a lot of GYN [gynecologist] visits. We still saw our obstetric patients in the office for the most part — basically they require more in-office care than some of the GYN consults. So that was a new phase that we needed to learn, doing these phone visits because we were used to seeing people face to face. It was interesting to deal with that, and now, we're wearing masks all the time. That's been an adjustment. Just a lot of different aspects now."
 
As a chief resident, King, a native of nearby Radford whose father ran a private practice in the New River Valley for years before retiring, ran into another issue forced by the pandemic – an inability to test new procedures on patients and teach those to residents looking to learn as they progress in their careers.
 
"The joy of being a chief resident is to aggressively teach," King said. "You want to start seeing younger residents progress faster, but if I haven't completed enough of a certain procedure to feel confident to a degree, then I'm not quite ready to hand off some of that responsibility and some of those cases. So that has a trickledown effect."
 
VCOM STUDENTS COPE WITH CHANGES
The trickledown effect reaches as far as those still pursuing their Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine degree at VCOM. Marie Johnston, a former Tech women's soccer player from Midlothian, Virginia, and Tara Feehan, a former lacrosse player from Glen Head, New York – two former roommates – both just concluded their third year at VCOM. The first two years at VCOM consist mostly of classroom instruction, but the third and fourth years involve clinical rotations at any number of hospitals around the country
 
In mid-March, Johnston, who wants to pursue family medicine, and Feehan, who wants to become and OB-GYN, were pulled from their rotations, in Newport News, Virginia and Danville, Virginia, respectively. They thus missed time applying the practical knowledge and skills that they had been learning. Most hospitals wanted to preserve PPE and to free attending physicians to deal with other COVID-related situations.
 
"It was tough because all you want to do is help," Feehan said. "You're helping people all year, and they tell you for the first time in your career, 'No, you can't help anyone. Don't go in. Study for your boards.' In a good way, it gave me time to study for the board exam I took last week, but I was very upset that I wasn't able to be on the front lines and doing what I had been doing all year. Luckily, they let us come back this month, so I'm back in Danville doing my primary care/family physician clinical. I'm on the front lines again, finally."
 
Johnston and Feehan also ran into conflicts while trying to schedule the second phase of their Comprehensive Osteopathic Medical Licensing Examination (COMLEX), which students usually take at some point between January and June of their third year.
 
"I think my boards have been canceled 10 times," said Johnston, who managed to take her exam before the July 4 holiday. "The boards are a nine-hour test of intense questions with barely any breaks, and you train for that. It's almost like a marathon where you want to peak at the right time and taper and all of that, and we've had students that have showed up the day of the test, and it got canceled and moved a lot of times. So there were a lot of unknowns with that."
 
Their more pressing concern, though, centers on the future location of their residencies. Once students graduate from medical school, they work anywhere from two to five years as residents, practicing medicine under the supervision of a senior medical doctor in that specialty. In the final year of medical school, students apply for residencies usually in September and then interview with medical schools later in the fall or early in the winter. In March, at a "Matching Day" ceremony, they get matched with a residency based on an algorithm that literally matches the highest ranked program by the student with a program that ranks that student the highest.
 
Usually, the interview process takes place on the hospital's campus, allowing the candidate to get a feel for the program, the staff, and the city/town. Now, because of the pandemic, those interviews are taking place online.
 
"I think about Virginia Tech," Johnston said. "You can look at pictures of Virginia Tech, but the look and feel you get from being there, you can't put that on paper.
 
"To me, that's another setback [because of the pandemic], just not being able to see the program and get a feel for it. Normally, you travel to the interview site and get to see the program and meet all the residents and get a feel for the program. Now they're doing interviews online, so it should be interesting to see how that plays out."
 
Feehan agreed.
 
"They say they're going to work on giving us virtual tours and meeting the residents virtually, but yeah, I definitely think it's a disadvantage because no one is going to show the bad parts of their program," she said. "They're only going to show the good parts of their program. So it's a big change. It's going to seem like we're going to trust programs from just looking at them online. We'll see."
 
A lot rides on every decision for medical school students. They invest four years of their lives studying to become doctors and not to mention the hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition. As most know, medical school isn't cheap.
 
But for Johnston, Feehan and many others currently in pursuit of their dreams, the price, work and sacrifice is totally worth it – no matter the risk. For them, the risk never outweighs the rewards.
 
"What has been hard is that I've wanted to be out there helping, and I think a lot of my classmates feel the same way," Johnston said. "We want to be in the field helping, and we realize right now or when it first started, that the personal protective equipment was limited and we were non-essential personnel, so it made sense to pull us from clinical rotations. But the whole pandemic, it's made me realize, 'Man, I just want to get back out there and do what I can to help people and be a peace in the chaos.'"
 
READY FOR WHATEVER THE FUTURE HOLDS
COVID-19 has affected everyone worldwide in some way, but for Feehan, the disease hits a little harder than for most people. She comes from a state – New York – that far and away leads the nation in COVID-19 deaths, and some of her relatives have contracted the disease. Fortunately, all continue to recover.
 
She found herself fielding all sorts of questions from relatives and not being able to provide answers. No one has been able to do that, as doctors, researchers and experts continue to collect and analyze data related to a disease that constantly changes.
 
But Feehan, like the others, remains undaunted about the situation. With the mindset of an athlete, she desperately wants to return to the field after the world's current setback.
 
"It [the pandemic] kind of confirmed, just in being away from clinicals, how much I loved medicine," Feehan said. "It was a great realization of, 'Wow, you really want to do something great for people, and you can't.' I'm really excited about going back and helping people when I couldn't. So if anything, this has motivated me more."
 
All those interviewed echoed these sentiments. They love the challenge and want the responsibility of being a part of the solution. They also feel prepared for it.
 
That came out in the interviews. They credited Virginia Tech for building their foundation as doctors or future doctors, developing work ethic and fine tuning time management skills. And of course, VCOM's instructors educated and trained them, putting them in pressure situations to handle incidents like pandemics.
 
"VCOM's been around for some time now, and they've gotten a good grasp of how to make and produce good doctors," Diaz said. "The hospitals I've been at and the classes I took while I was there really shaped and prepared me for this, and I'm thankful for that. I'm thankful for the people I was around and the friendships that grew out of there and even some of my fellow students from VCOM. It's been cool to look back at all that work, and the time spent was worth it. I wouldn't be here without those opportunities."
  
 
During an incredibly dark time in the world's history, all those who work in healthcare represent the better of humanity. Certainly, those who have attended or are attending VCOM are firmly entrenched on that list.
 
LIST OF THOSE FROM VIRGINIA TECH ATHLETICS WHO HAVE ATTENDED OR ARE ATTENDING VCOM