Feature
Solace Through Song
April 13, 2022
Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, the strain to hospital systems and staff has been huge. Stress, in some form or other, is ever present. For many, self-care has fallen by the wayside, leading to incremental levels of burn out. As an infectious disease specialist, Dr. Michèle Halpern, assistant professor in the Department of Medicine, and clinician at Montefiore New Rochelle Hospital, has had a front row seat to global epidemics but COVID took it to another level. One of the ways she copes with stress and finds balance is through her special interest in music, in particular singing and song-writing. She wrote a song about COVID, adapting the music from a famous Bach cello suite, which she chose for its exquisite beauty, sobriety yet complexity. Here, she explains her “why.”
Why did I write a song about COVID and not the multiple crises I have witnessed in my career as an infectious disease physician – the deadly and terrifying AIDS, Ebola, and West Nile epidemics? Why not write about the anthrax bioterrorism attacks, SARS-CoV-1, avian influenza, or the growing threat of increasingly multi-drug resistant bacteria? While all have impacted our society in various ways, none so far has caused trauma or challenged our healthcare system as extensively as the COVID pandemic.
During the first COVID wave, we were brutally faced with an exponentially growing number of patients sickened with respiratory distress, and were baffled by the multi-system complexity of the illness. Hospitals were overwhelmed, and ER’s unable to accommodate the sheer volume of patients; ICU beds were far too few, hence OR’s became ventilator units, inpatient floors became COVID floors, clinics and staff offices turned into patient rooms. Hospitals were short-staffed, and entire teams of doctors and nurses were redeployed regardless of subspecialties. Personal protective equipment was the new gold. Health care workers were stressed, traumatized, exhausted and functioning on a day-to-day survival mode. Some became ill themselves – some gravely, some fatally. We were scared of the known and the unknown; afraid to become ill, or worse, to make our loved ones ill at home. But we all marched on. What carried us through was our mission, the sense that we couldn’t let our patients or colleagues down; the desperate fear in patients’ eyes; the courage, determination, and dedication of our fellow health care workers; the gratitude of patients, their loved ones, and society in general, for doing our best. The elation when a patient didn’t die.
The world medical and scientific community raced to better understand the illness, promote protective measures, expand testing access, design clinical trials, treatment protocols, and develop vaccines, and we gained some control back. Nature gave us a break also, with some welcome seasonal dips in the pandemic. We are now in the midst of the omicron wave, the most contagious variant thus far, though mercifully not the most virulent. Perhaps this signals that we will be moving into an endemic phase in the near future, but COVID-19 has shown it can be predictably unpredictable.
COVID is a dominant topic in the scientific literature, lay press, and social media. But to my knowledge, it has so far been underrepresented in the art form. Songs can be an important way to vector stories. They can become an integral part of our history and culture in the form of national anthems, classical and popular music, or even folk art such as “Ring Around the Rosie,” which is commonly thought to refer to the Middle Ages plague epidemics.
I wrote the “COVID & Bach” song to express my gratitude to health care workers wherever they are for their expertise, hard work, courage, support. and personal sacrifices. And to tell the COVID story. The song may be long, but unfortunately, so too is the COVID story.
Listen to COVID and Bach.