LOS ANGELES _ Lisa Dabby sees fear in the patient's eyes. They are wide and bugged out. The pupils are haloed in white.
Brow beaded with sweat, the patient sits in street clothes, alone on a plastic chair in a tent set up in a driveway, a makeshift emergency room.
Dabby takes her stethoscope and hears a crackle inside the lungs.
She is a doctor in the ER at UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica. She treats patients who might otherwise die from unexpected trauma and illness.
This patient is drowning in open air.
A nurse has taken a history _ fever, body ache, cough _ so Dabby asks simple questions requiring nothing more taxing than a nod or a shake of the head. She promises tests, a bed, oxygen and wishes she could do more.
Like everyone, she listens to politicians and public health officials debate when to reopen the country. Each morning she looks at the numbers and is encouraged: The curve seems to be flattening.
But still she worries.
"People keep referring to us as the front line," she says later over the phone. "We're not the front line. Every individual in our country is the front line. All the coronavirus wants to do is spread, and everyone needs to realize they have the power to stop it."
The patient drowning in lung fluid weighs on her mind.
It is an evening shift in April, and in subsequent phone interviews she vividly recalls the events of this night. The patient arrives at the hospital and is directed to the COVID-19 screening tent. The terror Dabby sees in the eyes is the terror she sees in the most severe cases.
She finishes her exam, steps outside the tent, unsnaps her gown, removes her gloves and uses sanitizer. The alcohol stings her dry, cracked hands.
She looks at the patient's X-ray.
"Ohh," she sighs, and catches herself.
Whitish-gray patches cloud the far reaches of the lungs, where the picture is normally black.
Ground-glass opacities, she thinks, repeating a textbook description, the classic presentation of multi-focal pneumonia and COVID-19.
A nurse helps the patient to a room inside the hospital.
Dabby hasn't lost anyone to COVID-19, although three patients are on ventilators upstairs.
For weeks, staff at the hospital had waited for an anticipated wave of cases that never arrived, but each day brings a steady stream, which might be manageable if the disease itself were manageable.
Without a cure or treatment, however, the playbook is always changing.
"It is frustrating, unsettling _ I don't have the right adjective for it," she says. "For the first time in my life, I don't know what will work. I've been asked to treat an illness without the answers."
