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.'”

Unless your spirit’s been broken, your flaws will always be hidden
Knowing right choice years later is useless without time machine
Practically and legally, it’s true: Good fences make good neighbors
Yes, I truly appreciate your flaws; they point the way to your worth
Too many voices with little to say: Politics matters less and less to me
For a culture where God is dead, spiritual emergence is madness
2-day-old baby reminds me that miracles still happen every day
Without hope for a better future, depression grabs us by the throat
Don’t personalize: The system is the issue, not Obama or any individual