Galen Schram is a hospital-based physical therapist at NYU Langone Health in New York City. He has worked with patients across several departments including pediatrics and emergency medicine and currently specializes in cancer rehab. His short story… — Galen Schram is a hospital-based physical therapist at NYU Langone Health in New York City. He has worked with patients across several departments including pediatrics and emergency medicine and currently specializes in cancer rehab. His short story “Dislocation” appears in the Fall 2020 *Intima*.

There is a special place in my heart for dragonslayers. My childhood heroes like Bilbo Baggins and Harry Potter defeated theirs. The hardest lesson I’ve had to learn was summarized by Dr. Andrea Hansell in her piece, “The Dragonslayer” (Spring 2015 Intima). The week her husband Jim passed away following a stem cell transplant to treat amyloidosis, she discovered that “monstrous dragons can kill the most valiant of men.” What a horrible truth.

Jim died at Boston Medical Center the week after the marathon bombings. When Dr. Hansell describes Boston under lockdown during the search for the Tsarnaev brothers, I think of New York City when the pandemic began last spring, the setting of my fiction piece “Dislocation” (Fall 2020 Intima), and also in the ensuing months when our streets bore witness to a nation unable to reconcile its racist treatment of black bodies. I remember, like Dr. Hansell, a hospital television exposing trauma either surfacing or unfolding: George Floyd’s and Elijah McClain’s last words before they were killed, Tamika Taylor’s calls for justice for her daughter, Breonna; clips of overflowing ICUs preceding clips of unmasked people at pool parties and political rallies.

My dark thought is that 2021 will be the year we discover the extent of our collective trauma. I think of people like Willard from my story. Willard, already the grandson of one COVID-19 victim, is at the mercy of calls from overwhelmed providers for updates on his grandmother, Mrs. Nguyen. How does someone recover from something like that?

And if Mrs. Nguyen survives her hospitalization, would she, like nearly twenty percent of critical illness survivors, face symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder?

Can what we know about PTSD in frontline workers who treated the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings help us understand how to care for our COVID-19 frontline workers?

What will be done to understand and treat race-based traumatic stress, a term I hadn’t heard until this summer?

I don’t have answers, but Dr. Hansell offers us insight from 2015. When she mentions following the stories of Boston Marathon survivors, she demonstrates making space for hope. I reflected on the last time I did, and came up with two instances: once during Dolly Parton’s interview on Today after her donation helped fund a COVID vaccine, and again when the American Medical Association declared racism a public health threat. I will protect this space of hope as I enter 2021.

Galen Schram is a hospital-based physical therapist at NYU Langone Health in New York City. He has worked with patients across several departments including pediatrics and emergency medicine and currently specializes in cancer rehab. From March to May of this year he was redeployed to work exclusively with patients hospitalized with the novel coronavirus. He graduated with his Doctor of Physical Therapy from Columbia University in 2013. One of his favorite courses during graduate school was an introduction to Narrative Medicine. At present he is enrolled in Columbia’s Narrative Medicine Certification program. For Schram, writing stories has always been both exciting and therapeutic. He has ambitions to publish a novel. He lives in Queens with his partner, an occupational therapist and frontline worker. His short story “Dislocation” appears in the Fall 2020 Intima.