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ICU Doctor Shares Details About the Power of Storytelling During a Global Pandemic
Dr. A. Joseph Layon recounts his journey toward understanding during a time of death, isolation, and disconnection.
When Dr. A Joseph Layon stepped into the Intensive Care Unit to help save the lives and alleviate the suffering of patients threatened by the first wave of COVID-19, he realized that this challenge was similar only to the beginning of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the early 1980s, early in his career. A respected Professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Central Florida, College of Medicine, Dr. Layon has a long history of bringing his skills to war zones of various kinds. Nonetheless, he was taken aback by what he saw every day in the ICU.
He captures this life-changing experience in the powerful and much-needed article “Are You Alright?” On Pandemic Death, Isolation, Connection, and Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” just published in Survive & Thrive: A Journal for Medical Humanities and Narrative as Medicine.
Written with Mary N. Layoun, an Emerita Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the article takes the shape of a dialogue that talks openly about the process of dying in a late capitalist world devastated by a virulent, deadly pandemic. It explores longstanding…
