And when you chip away at some of the glamour of medicine that's often portrayed on television and you get to the nuts and bolts of taking care of someone, you realize that it's a very different endeavor, you realize that it is about something very different at the core of it. And so my experience at Heartland gave me one of those experiences for me, was a first where I had to actually wipe a patient clean where I had to actually clear out their soiled linen and other things and help them to the bathroom and back, just rudimentary things. And that's what it's all about is taking care of someone.
During the COVID 19 crisis. Many people have been working from home, or have seen their jobs evaporate as the economy is turned upside down by mandated closures. Of course, there are groups of people, including first responders, service workers in skilled trades that have been going to work every day to perform essential services. And then there are health care workers. We've been depending on doctors, nurses and other health care staff to not only be on the job, but to be in contact with the people most likely to have Coronavirus. This is random acts of knowledge presented by Heartland Community College. I'm your host, Steve fast. Today we're speaking with a Heartland alumnus who has been on the job during the pandemic. And he also happens to be a recipient of the 2020 Distinguished Alumni Award from Heartland Community College where his journey into the field of health care began.
I'm Dr. Sasha Roe, I'm a hospitalist here at Del Norte hospital. It is a community hospital out in Geneva, Illinois, and we are part of the northwestern medicine system. And so I'm an internal medicine physician and I take care of patients exclusively who are admitted to the hospital and are too sick to go home.
We are recording this right in the middle of the COVID 19 pandemic. You're at work right now, can you just describe a little bit what your day to day work life has been for the last several weeks.
So it's obviously a different time. And we are dealing with a viral pandemic essentially that a lot of people have a difficult time fully understanding the scope of and that's not just for members of the public. But also for us physicians, it's very difficult to continue to learn about the virus and how it affects different individuals differently. And at the same time learn how to treat it. Now, I think one of the things that we have a very great understanding of is how to treat the seasonal flu and all the complications that arise from a flu infection. But what we still don't fully understand is how to effectively treat Coronavirus COVID 19 infection. And it's one of those things that is truly I think challenged doctors and hospitals and medical systems because it has sent us really scrambling for resources and ideas and search to find the most effective treatments for this condition. In the pandemic period. It's just been a scenario for us where we've seen the hospital go from being extremely busy with the usual admissions for cardiac complaints and other respiratory complaints and patients who are in a post operative period where we're taking care of them after surgery and they are having usual scheduled surgeries and emergency surgeries to now effectively across Illinois and across the United States. A lot of hospitals have cancelled elective procedures and the restricted hospital access to only necessary procedures or emergency procedures and necessary hospital admission. So the hospital this kind of just feels very different because of that, too.
So in your entire journey to becoming a healthcare professional from when you first started to your practice now, was there anything that prepared you for this kind of situation?
And that's a great question because I want to say two things your you know, one, as with every hospital out there, they typically designate one of the units of the hospital as a COVID-19 unit and they take care of COVID 19 patients in that unit just to restrict contact with the virus. And, you know, the question you asked me could just as well be applied applicable to the nurses and physicians that round on that unit. You know, all of the nurses that are currently taking care of COVID 19 patients in my hospital here a donor never trained specifically to take care of patients in a pandemic situation but they have risen to that challenge and a lot of it goes down to for the nurses and for physicians it goes down to reaching down to your basics which is hand washing, proper hygiene, maintaining if Active distance from the patient and being efficient in the room, reducing the number of visits to that room, trying to address all of the patient's concerns as efficiently as possible in the shortest time possible. And you do all of those basics right? And then that is effectively 90% of it. And patients respond to the virus differently. And that makes us rely on the expertise of lung doctors, lung specialists, heart specialist, intensive care doctors, and it's a truly multidisciplinary team that comes together. But if you ask if there's specific training that we have to deal with patients in a pandemic situation, I don't think so I don't think a majority of us have that training, I think we drill down on the basics, and we make sure we get those things right.
So let's talk a little bit about how you've made it to where you are today. Originally, your family's from India.
That's right. My parents were born in India, I was born in India, I grew up there. And I immigrated here and went through my training here.
So how old were you? When you came to the US?
I was on the cusp of turning 21.
And when did you end up going to Heartland Community College and what led you there, the educational
system in India and the United States are very different. And primarily in India, you decide in your 10th grade, before your 10th grade if you want to apply to medical school, and at the time, I just did not have the focus or the foresight to know exactly what I wanted to do with my life. And so by default, in some sense, I went into the field of accounting and commerce and I went to undergrad in India and I had a bachelor's degree in, in accounting, and I also did some computer science work, training and all of that. And then when I moved here, you know, the credit system here is very different. And it's hard to argue that your accounting degree should somehow translate over to pre medicine credit. And so in some sense, I had to redo a lot of those classes, some of which I had exposure to the last it was in my 10th grade several years before, so I had to redo a lot of them. And I primarily had one goal, which is how many different kinds of healthcare or healthcare related experiences can I get? Or can I experience before my apply to medical school, because one of the things with medical college applications is that they're looking for candidates with a variety of experiences. And so that's what I was trying to do is get as much very different experience as possible, and becoming a certified nursing assistant opened up some opportunities, or at least I thought it did. And so that's why I pursued that certification. And the nearest place where I could get that at the time when I was studying at Illinois State University was Heartland Community College. And so that's what got me there.
Did you have a moment where you're thinking, Oh, I can pursue going into medicine now because that is available? Or did you think, Okay, I am studying accounting in business. And this is not for me. And instead I want to go into
I, after moving to the United States, I really I had no sense for what I truly wanted to do. I have relatives that are physicians here cousins who motivated me and kind of provided me with that sense that, you know, anything is possible. And then once I moved to Illinois State, I had a lot of advisors, and even with Heartland Community College, the advisors there and the courses there, it helped me get just exposed to the healthcare field, because what you see on TV and what is actually true at the level of the patient, and at the level of the individual that you're providing health care to, it's very different. And so I had to experience healthcare in a real world setting. Before I started feeling like yes, I could be a part of this. And this is something that I feel is a meaningful pursuit. And so Heartland kind of was one of the important pieces in that larger decision.
What was that CNA program like for you? How did it open your eyes that things might be different than than you had realized?
The thing is, I mean, I grew up in a large family, multi generational family, I had grandparents and granddad's everyone living together. So it's not that I'd never seen an aging individual growing up. But I was never in a situation where I had to care for them. Because you know, we in India, you often have servants and you often have helpers in the home. And you don't have to be very affluent to be able to have that kind of a setup. And so there's always someone there to help you take care of the elderly in India. But you know, moving here and then the experience at Heartland really put me in a room with one of the residents at McLean County nursing home and that was responsible and helping the CNAs there and the nurses there to actually take care of these things. Asians at a very basic level, like, it could mean clearing up meal trays or cleaning up the patient after they've eaten or spilled on themselves or helping them get to the restroom and back, or if they had soiled themselves, helping clean them and things and, and when you chip away at some of the glamour of medicine that's often portrayed on television and you get to the nuts and bolts of taking care of someone, you realize that it's a very different endeavor, you realize that it is about something very different at the core of it. And so my experience at Heartland gave me one of those experiences for me, was a first where I had to actually wipe a patient clean where I had to actually clean, you know, clear out their soiled linen and other things and, and help them to the bathroom and back just rudimentary things. And that's what it's all about is taking care of someone. And so that Heartland experience gave me that.
It's interesting, because the things that you talk about, I think might be things that could turn somebody away, you know, make them say, Oh, this is there's a great degree of empathy and care that you have to bring to those jobs and to understanding your patients, it seems to me that your reaction to it is the one that patients would want their caregiver to have,
thank you comes across as a compliment. So you meant to be Well, the thing is, you want your training to always be the toughest part of your career, you know, you don't want your training to be easy, or you don't want your trainer to be mild with things or to go easy on you or to, you know, you want to get the actual experience you want to get in there, you want to be given a chance to get your hands dirty, so to speak, you want to experience all of that the sights, the smells, the you know, the pain, you know, the lack of sleep, all of that you want that because it only prepares you and kind of makes you better equipped to deal with the real world scenario. And so now, even though I don't change out patients, I don't clean them up. You know, we have certified nursing aides that do that in a hospital, we have nurses that help out with that. And the most I do is occasionally help with transferring a patient from one part of the bed to another. But that's still it gives you an appreciation for what it takes to find a patient sitting comfortably in a recliner or to find them cleaned and fed and prepared for the day. You know, it doesn't happen by accident. And and I think once you go through this kind of training, where you're asked to do all of these things that might seem difficult and, and not very pleasant when you're experiencing it. I think it prepares you. And it gives you a sense of appreciation for what others are doing in a hospital setting.
So as you did advance, and you pursued a specialty, what captured your interest as you move forward after you left Heartland as you continued on, went to med school, what what was your direction and interest, then
I think there are so many different ways or different routes people take to arrive at the careers that they choose or the specialties they choose. For me. It always interested me how people live or what their story was, before they showed up at the hospital or just looking at the patient as one individual and not fitting them into the larger picture of their life or their experiences. It didn't appeal to me. And so that's why I could you know, my theology colleagues will probably not like this or my radiology colleagues will probably not like this. But I preferred more of a hands on approach and more of an interaction with the patient to get to understand that piece of the patient, which is what is their life, like outside of the hospital? What was it like before they became a patient here, and those kinds of things really interested me. And so when I was at Heartland when I was at the McLean County nursing home, I realized that, you know, that was something that I valued a lot, which is being in physical contact with the patient being in close proximity, sitting down and talking to them about some life experiences that they'd had. And those kinds of things helped me understand that whatever specialty I chose afterwards, it would have to involve some kind of direct patient care. And so that kind of is an answer that I think fits my Heartland experience in with where I am. Now.
One other thing I want to ask you related to that as you are working with patients now during this pandemic, or they're worried about the virus and how it might be affecting not only potential of contracting the virus but the concerns that they might have over other issues. Is there more anxiety,
there is a lot of anxiety and I don't think all of that anxiety is useful in as much as there are different media sources and outlets for information and there's a CDC website and there are plenty of hospital websites. There are good sources of information, I think you often you're just tuned to pay more attention to the worst outcomes. And you know, some of those cases where it's a very young individual who was relatively healthy that then did not do so well with the condition of COVID-19. And then that resonates in your head, and it echoes and it just becomes louder and louder. And, and it feeds that anxiety in you. And I think if you allow that to happen, then it can get in the way of you seeking medical care, even when it's appropriate. You know, and we are seeing that a lot of patients are just very anxious to come to the hospital, even when they have legitimate urgent medical conditions that need urgent attention. It's a challenge now to modulate the message just right to where you help them understand that yes, you don't want to contract the Coronavirus. But at the same time, if you have certain conditions, like say certain symptoms, like chest pain or abdominal pain, or you're, you know, you're having a headache that's not going away, and you're having some blurry vision or drooping in your face. And these are things that need attention right away, and you still have to come into the hospital. And so yes, to answer your question, we are seeing a fair amount of anxiety. And I think unfortunately, in a situation like this, it's understandable that people would have such anxiety. And I'm just hoping that it does not keep them from seeking medical care that they need.
You've been named a distinguished alum of Heartland, and we would recognize you at our commencement, but our commencement is going to be held virtually this year. It's too bad that we won't see you in person. But the one thing that I can say is, I do appreciate you taking the time to do this during a pretty busy period for yourself. And thanks for all the work that you and your colleagues throughout all of the healthcare fields are doing to keep us safe and healthy, as much as possible during this unusual period.
Thank you for that message. And I just want to make sure that I thank all of the technicians, the phlebotomist, nurses, all of the doctors in the emergency room, the lung specialists that work very closely with these patients, ICU doctors, they're doing just an incredible job across the United States across the world, you know, and it feels great to be part of such an accomplished team and to really bask in their brilliance.
Well, Doctor, thanks for being with us today.
Absolutely, thank you.
Doctor station Rao is an internal medicine physician and an alumnus of Heartland Community College, where he was in the Certified Nursing Assistant Program. He is a recipient of the 2020 Heartland Community College Distinguished Alumni Award. To hear other interviews with notable people connected with heartland community college or about self care, healthcare and more. Subscribe to this podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify Audioboom or wherever you heard this one. Thanks for listening
