The head of the emergency department at a Manhattan hospital committed suicide after spending days on the front lines of the coronavirus battle, her family said Monday.
“She tried to do her job, and it killed her,’’ Dr. Philip Breen told the New York Times of his physician daughter, Dr. Lorna Breen, who had been medical director of the NewYork-Presbyterian Allen Hospital amid the pandemic.
The battle-weary ER doctor, 49, was only the latest city healthcare worker to take her own life.
Two days earlier, a Bronx EMT witnessing the virus’s ruthless toll fatally shot himself with a gun belonging to his retired NYPD cop dad.
Tragic rookie paramedic John Mondello, 23, worked out of EMS Station 18 in The Bronx, which handles one of the biggest 911 call volumes in the city.
Lorna died Sunday in Charlottesville, Va., where she’d been staying with her family, the father told the Times.
Philip Breen said his daughter had gotten sick with the virus while on the job at one point, but then returned to work after about a week and a half of recuperating. Still, the hospital sent her home again, and her family brought her to Virginia.
She had no history of mental illness, he said. But when they last spoke, she told him how excruciating it was to have to continually watch contagion patients die, including some even before they could be taken from the ambulance.
nypost.com/2020/04/27/manhattan-er-doc-lorna-breen-commits-suicide-shaken-by-coronavirus/