USC Athletes in Healthcare Respond to COVID-19
Los Angeles Daily News
Former USC athletes rise to the challenge of healthcare professions during coronavirus pandemic
By MAGGIE VANONI | mvanoni@scng.com | Southern California News Group
PUBLISHED: May 17, 2020 at 1:24 p.m. | UPDATED: May 17, 2020 at 3:20 p.m.
Adam Shilling knows his patient doesn’t have the proper equipment at home. They don’t have weights, elastic bands or any sort of workout machine for rehabilitation exercises. Still, as a physical therapist, he needs to come up with a way to administer rehab exercises for his patient’s shoulder through this virtual appointment.
“How young is your brother? Can you give him a piggyback?”
The young boy’s face on the other side of the screen lights up at the fun idea.
After a couple of reps of the patient giving his younger brother a piggyback standing up, Shilling asks him to try to do it safely while going up and down a couple of stairs. While it might not be the typical form of exercise he recommends to his patients, seeing the smile on the child’s face as he begins to regain muscle strength makes it worth it.
“I never thought that physical therapy would have been one of the jobs that we could have done remotely two, three months ago,” Shilling said. “I would have said, ‘Well, no. We’re not going to be able to work if we can’t lay hands on people.’ Nevertheless, here we are.”
In today’s world, where physical touch and in-person contact is avoided due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the majority of Shilling’s patient appointments are held virtually. It’s been a challenge to come up with creative ways to help his patients keep up rehab exercises despite not being in person nor having the right equipment.
But as he’s demonstrated time after time when he was a goalie for the USC men’s water polo team, he never backs down from a challenge.
“Do you have an empty milk jug? Yes? Perfect, now fill it with water and use it as a weight.”
“Do you have a soccer ball or basketball? Can you pick it up and toss it back and forth with a family member?”
“Roll the towel up vertically and you have yourself a roller.”
The world is relying on the strength of healthcare workers everywhere and in every field right now. Former USC athletes, just like Shilling, are using their collegiate athlete experiences to thrive under the pressures that come with shifting to virtual practices and working under heightened safety precautions during the pandemic.
“Athletics has paved the way for me to do what I do and handle the stress in a confident, relaxed manner,” former USC women’s volleyball player Dr. Kathleen ‘Katie’ Metcalf said. “At the end of the day, it was a volleyball game, but now the stakes are a little bit higher.”
Whether the score was 15-all in the fifth set or the match sweep was on the line in the third, in split seconds Metcalf — who went by Katie Heller during her playing days — had to react and attempt to score or put up a timely block against an opponent as an outside hitter for the Trojans from 1990-1993.
Now, as a OB/GYN hospitalist, her moments under pressure look much different.
Her court is now a delivery room. Crowd noises are instead a soon-to-be mother’s screams. Instead of a USC uniform, Metcalf wears a white doctor’s coat and scrubs. The once big, red bow in her hair is replaced with a mask as she helps deliver a newborn.
“You have to have that focus, intensity, grit, resilience,” she said. “There is not a lot of room for error in my job. It’s like it’s 15-all back in college when I want the ball served to me, it’s the same thing now. I have that confidence to do what I need to do to make sure I have a safe mommy and make sure I have a safe baby.”
One of the biggest challenges in Metcalf’s clinic during the pandemic is watching patients delay coming in for help because of fear of being in a hospital during this time. If a patient calls and says they have a fever, while that is a symptom for the novel coronavirus, it can also be from the patient’s pregnancy as well.
It’s in these moments Metcalf must not only try to ease the patient’s concerns about coming in, but also start diagnosing symptoms so she can be ready to help if and when the patient does make an in-person appointment.
Having to be a voice of reason during a time of such uncertainty is something former USC men’s water polo player and current orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Daniel Lim, understands just as well. While still performing emergency operations, he’s having serious conversations with patients about putting off non time-sensitive surgeries.
“It’s challenging to know what exactly is the right answer and quite frankly, I don’t think anybody definitively knows what that is right now,” he said. “We want to be optimistic, but we also want to be careful and be responsible. That’s been the hardest part. We want to know more.”
Yet, it’s this need to perform to the best of his ability for the sake of his patients’ health that keeps Lim from backing down. It’s a trait he learned while competing for the Trojans during 2005-2007. Instead of getting his body in shape to tread water during a water polo game, he’s continuously educating himself on the latest health precautions.
“There is a desire to execute very well, to do right by your patient as much as you want to do right by your teammates and yourself when you perform in athletics,” he said. “That comes with a little excitement and you get a little bit of those butterflies right before you get in because it means a lot to you that somebody trusts you and puts that faith in you to do right by them and that’s a big honor.”
Former USC women’s basketball guard Dr. LeeAnne Sera, a dentist in Santa Clara County, was forced to close her clinic due to stay-at-home orders, however, the amount of the patients coming in for emergency care is more than normal. Sera said she sees about 10-20 emergency patients a week, which she believes is due to the immense amount of stress caused by the pandemic.
“This pandemic has created a lot of uncertainty and challenges, and we manifest that in our bodies,” she said. “We manifest that in our mouth in how we clench and grind and deal with these new stresses.”
Competing on the USC women’s basketball team, from 1982-1984, during the program’s historic back-to-back national championship runs, Sera puts a high-level of expectation into everything she does. This is especially true now as she continues to learn how new health precautions will affect her practice moving forward and what a virtual resource would look like for the world of dentistry.
“The way we practice is going to be different,” she said. “It’s going to be different for a while because we’re not going to be able to see the volume of patients. Just the whole way our world is shifting, we’re all doing something differently.”
Through the challenges of adapting to new roles and guidelines on the healthcare stage, these former athletes don’t give up. Whether it’s having to make tough calls for the betterment of a patient or learning how to perform through a virtual world, the only thing they know is to push forward and continue.
“It’s more than a job,” Lim said. “It’s a vocation. It’s a calling. It’s a responsibility. It’s that moment to seize because it’s our time to contribute and make a difference. We’re in a position to do some good.”
