DMU is proud to “share” alumnus Jeff Kinyon, D.O.’02, with Cornell College, where he completed his undergraduate degree in biochemistry and molecular biology and philosophy in 1994. An emergency medicine attending physician at St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center in Paterson, NY, he’s working in a hospital with the third busiest ER in the United States on a normal day.
To say his team is even busier now is an understatement as they find themselves at the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States.
“At times we’ve felt overwhelmed, but I think we’ve handled it well,” Kinyon told Cornell in a feature on its website. “We had initially planned on dividing our ER into two sections, one to isolate potential COVID patients, the other for everyone else. This lasted a couple of days and by the end of the week, all of our typical emergencies – heart attacks, strokes, traumas – seemed to dry up overnight and the entire department was filled with patients gasping for breath requiring varying forms of breathing assistance.”
Just a 35-minute drive from New York City, Kinyon’s hospital was quickly filled with patients on ventilators when the virus started to spread.
“We moved our ER to our waiting room and tents in our parking lot, trying to triage who could go home and who would need immediate critical assistance,” he told Cornell. “We keep a daily tally of available ventilators which we’ve been fortunate enough to yet need to ration. Each week we have a new patch of doctors out either sick or on quarantine, forcing us to adjust our coverage accordingly. Days now consist of managing our current ventilated patients, figuring out who is worsening and needs to be intubated, and sorting through the waiting room list for sickest patients.”
The doctors in his ER are ready to serve the sickest patients, and they take pride in their training.
Read more about Dr. Kinyon in the Cornell College News Center or watch an interview by KCCI-TV8 reporter Stacey Horst.
