Welcome to Public Health On Call, a new podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Our focus is the novel coronavirus.

I'm Josh Sharfstein, a faculty member at Johns Hopkins, and also a former secretary of Maryland's health department.

Our goal with this podcast is to bring evidence and experts to help you understand today's

news about the novel coronavirus and what it means for tomorrow.

If you have questions, you can email them to public health question at jhh.edu.

That's public health question at jh.h. That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes.

Today Stephanie Desmond talks to clinical psychologist Dr. Megan Hosey of the Johns Hopkins

Hospital Intensive Care Unit. They discuss the challenges of being a patient in the

intensive care unit as well as the challenges of of being a patient in the intensive care unit, as well as the

challenges of having been a patient in the intensive care unit. Let's listen. Thank you so much for

joining me. My pleasure to be here. Megan, you're a clinical psychologist in the Hopkins ICU. Could

you tell me sort of what that means?

Yes. I have the opportunity to work with patients who need help to survive. That looks like

mechanical ventilation, types of medications that help keep blood pressure up and sometimes dialysis.

I get to be there because as you can imagine, the ICU is a pretty scary place to be.

My day today looks like talking to patients about what life looked like before the ICU,

getting a sense of what they're hoping to get back to,

understanding about how their cognition looks in the ICU,

because as we'll probably discuss, ICU delirium is something that's very common.

And then finally, managing the anxiety that might come along with being mechanically ventilated.

This is also that they can engage more fully in their rehabilitation

...