Like a pitcher going for a perfect game, Dr. Sakib Maya has superstitions. But instead of a pair of lucky socks or a rabbit’s foot, it’s raspberries and T-shirts.
Maya said he tries to have a small box of raspberries frequently with his breakfast, believing in the power of the antioxidants and vitamin C to propel him.
"People make fun of me at work saying, 'Hey, there he goes eating his raspberries.' But I feel like that's what's keeping me going,” Maya said, adding the tradition came from flu season. “I feel like that's going to keep me away from all the illness that I'm facing."
When he comes to work, it’s always T-shirts and scrub bottoms, but no scrub tops until the first patient.
"I guess that's why I like baseball because I'm very superstitious,” he said. “When something works, I stick with it."
It’s a pair of constants in a medical world that evolves and changes every day in his work at the Braselton urgent care clinic. Maya tries to get to work a few minutes before his 8 a.m. 12-hour shift along with others on his staff.
"Every morning we just regroup,” he said. “We're like, 'Hey, what are we doing today? What went wrong yesterday that we can change today?'"
Hometown heroes
COVID-19 has been hard on many, but for these frontline health care workers, its effects are an everyday reality. Over the next two weeks, we share the stories of a few of those who have risen to the occasion and done their jobs well in the face of unmatched pressure professionally and sometimes personally. We need heroes in this battle, and through their dedication, they have shown us what that looks like. We worked with Northeast Georgia Health System to identify those we are profiling, and this series is being made available free to nonsubscribers. Thank you to our subscribers for making our work possible. If you are not a subscriber, please consider supporting our work by subscribing to The Times. If you have a story about a frontline health care worker who has made a difference, please submit your story to news@gainesvilletimes.com. For other stories in this series, visit gainesvilletimes.com/hometownheroes.
While they still have the same urgent care needs as they always do — ankle fractures, falls, headaches — there has been a new “hefty load” from COVID-19 testing and managing patients’ COVID symptoms, Maya said.
Northeast Georgia Health System officials said the Braselton location is the busiest of its urgent care centers, seeing 25% more patient volume than anticipated.
Maya said he attends to roughly 40-50 patients each day, but the work doesn’t end there. He sees roughly two to three patients every 20 minutes, and he’ll receive three or four emails that need instant answers because of issues another medical provider might be facing like a problem with personal protective equipment.
After Thanksgiving, families of six or more would come all at once to get tested, fearing they had been exposed to the virus. If a school experiences a breakout, Maya can expect to see all of their classmates, teachers and staff coming to urgent care.
Maya said it was middle to late May when he realized COVID was here to stay and accepted it as the new norm, but the turning point was when a handful of his hospital friends came for testing.
People he had hung out with and seen their smiling faces now looked like they were fighting for their lives, Maya said.
"I saw how miserable they looked,” Maya said. “They looked like hell, because partially they had been working crazy hours and second they had been having a headache nonstop for 10 days. That's when it hit me that this thing is real."
These past nine months have been nothing compared to med school or residency, Maya said.
"I hear from my own staff,” he said. “They've seen me work for the past four years and they're like, 'We've never seen you get flustered, but you show signs of getting flustered for about two minutes at a time here and there every few weeks.' But then I catch my cool and go with the flow. (The stress) is probably higher than anything I've experienced before."
His solution? Find a distraction to help you move on.
If he’s experiencing a troublesome patient or an email about something he can’t control, it might be time to grab a coffee, wait to reply to that email or just hope the next patient is a bit nicer.
"It's almost like playing a team sport,” Maya said. “You've got to remember you're not alone. I also tell myself, 'Hey, nobody gets trained for a pandemic.' This is something you just learn. There was no chapter in the medical school book that said here's how you deal with a pandemic, because every pandemic is different."
At home, there’s an unwritten rule: No talk about COVID.
When the COVID-19 outbreak hit Northeast Georgia, Maya and his wife, Hareem, were caring for their 15-month-old daughter, Samara.
At first, Maya said he thought he would follow some of the precautions he had heard others doing: running into the basement, showering and cleaning his clothes before coming up to see his family.
But Maya has decided on a much more relaxed routine, “picking comfort over the precautions right now.”
"At work, we do all the precautions possible, but when I come home ... I don't want to be, 'Hey, COVID this, COVID that. Let me be careful. Let me wash this,’” Maya said.
When the COVID-19 surge was down, Samara had her first birthday, which was described as all “Baby Shark.”
"Now she's jumped up to 'Frozen,' so it's changing it up a little bit,” Maya said. “She's finally over the 'Baby Shark' phase."
As his wife continues studying in med school, Maya and his daughter try to spend their time outside, whether it is a neighborhood walk or grocery store runs even when they don’t need anything.
"She's been indoors all her life, so just going outdoors keeps her really excited (and) tires her out easily,” he said.