An emergency room doctor faces death every day, but Dr. Mert Erogul experienced a touching encounter with life this week — as he watched life slipping away from a 100-year-old woman.
Erogul is a physician at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. It’s been a terrible week for medical staffers at hospitals across New York City, as these overworked doctors and nurses care for those afflicted with COVID-19 in addition to their normal work load.
But the story of one patient stands out to Erogul this week.
Among the massive caseload he was dealing with was a 100-year-old Hasidic Jewish woman who had been stricken by COVID-19 and gotten pneumonia. Erogul wanted to get her stable enough to send home — so she could die at home with family — but she was doing so poorly that he couldn’t release her.
After the woman’s blood pressure dropped and Erogul decided to keep her in the hospital, the woman’s son kept calling for an hour to find out how she was doing.
“I finally told him, ‘Look, she’s a hundred years old with pneumonia in both lungs,'” Erogul wrote on a Facebook post. “‘She’s not good. She’s not going to do well.'”

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