I’m honored to have my perspective - as a mother, and grandmother, and physician - included in this article in this month’s Hadassah magazine by journalist Debra Nussbaum Cohen.

“At the same time, Covid has completely altered what it means to be a physician. “I was known as the doctor who would spend more time with patients and hear them deeply,” says Dr. Fischer, who works at an urgent care clinic. “Now I go to work wearing a face respirator, a shield over it, a bonnet and isolation gowns and gloves. We try to minimize our time in each room. Now people can barely hear you, they can’t see your face. It interferes with communication, you’re muffled through all those layers, and there is fear in these interactions.”

And there is grief over the losses—personal, professional and economic—that Dr. Fischer believes people will struggle with for a long time. “We’ve all lost really significant things. Relationships. Prom.” She says she will have to come to terms with not being able to hug her grandchildren, the children of her adult stepchildren, and not being able to hug her patients and staff. “When you don’t see your new baby grandkids for a whole year, you don’t get that back. Life won’t go back to the same kind of normal.”