My COVID Hero: How Art Helped Me Reflect on a Global Pandemic by Dr. Brandon Mogrovejo — Intima

Lately, I’ve drawn as a way to reflect on myself and other healthcare providers.

One late evening, just two months into my intern year in pediatrics and seven months into a forever changed New York City, I sat down and drew. I drew from a place of anxiety, working the equivalent of two full-time jobs in a hospital during a time when the people I care for, my loved ones and my patients, were under great strain. I drew from a place of admiration of fellow residents pushing tirelessly to care for sick children. Most importantly, I drew from a place of hope, that the world was better prepared to control the pandemic and compress the hemorrhaging of lost life.

The mark of victory over our great battle not yet won? A simple mask that cannot simply be raised. Not unlike the Iwo Jima Memorial honoring our Marines, it takes gallant effort. A herculean task to overcome the political dogma of Americans who cry “liberty” and “freedom” while we, the soldiers, risk death of body and death of mind.

But just who are the heroes in this war? There are many answers to this question, all correct. There are many heroes.

Grocery store clerks. First responders.

Subway operators. Scientists.

Delivery persons. Healthcare workers.

My heroes too, are many. My heroes are the women I work around every single day in the hospital or clinic. I work in a specialty filled with women in a world dominated by men. In taking care of kids and their families over the course of a day, I may interact with only women, from attending physicians to nurses to pharmacists to social workers. Every day, I spend time with my wife, an oncology pharmacist and my loving partner of 10 years. The front-line workers I see, know, and love are women, a simultaneously unremarkable yet remarkable experience. A significant experience. A marker of progress? Perhaps.

And so I drew that August evening. A drawing based on a memorial. A drawing that is a memorial yet to be built. A memorial not to war. But to triumph.

Triumph over disease and a global pandemic.

Triumph over selfishness and anti-intellectualism.

Triumph over sexism and patriarchy.

A memorial I strive to build alongside others for future generations.

Brandon Mogrovejo is a first-generation Latino physician training in pediatrics. He makes comics with diverse, underrepresented characters in his spare time. He was born in a working class family to an Ecuadorian father and an Italian-American mother. Before becoming the first in his family to go to medical school at the Columbia Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons, Dr. Mogrevo attended college at Fordham University where he double-majored in African & African-American Studies and Biology, and minored in Theology. He is a very proud New Yorker who lives in his favorite borough, the Bronx, with his beautiful, ever-entertaining wife. His prior work includes a comic book on Type 1 Diabetes entitled “Liz Unity & Her Somatic Adventures,” which can be viewed at his Instagram @BrandMDrawings.

Originally published at https://www.theintima.org on January 29, 2021.