Matthew Steinberger
Title
Matthew Steinberger
Description
In this interview, Matthew Steinberger shares what it was like working as a Doctor during the prime of Covid-19.
Publisher
Detroit Historical Society
Rights
Detroit Historical Society
Language
en-US
Narrator/Interviewee's Name
Matthew Steinberger
Interviewer's Name
Kevin Hawthorne
Interview Length
Track 1, 14:14
Track 2, 1:46
Track 2, 1:46
Transcription
Begin Track 1
Kevin Hawthorne: Hello, this is Kevin Hawthorne with the Detroit Stroke Museum. And I'm here today with.
Matt Steinberger: Matt Steinberger.
Kevin Hawthorne: All right. Thank you so much for joining us today, Matt. Just to start, in, what area do you live in currently?
Matt Steinberger: I currently live in Ann Arbor.
Kevin Hawthorne: And what is your occupation?
Matt Steinberger: I'm a physician not to care about that. I'm a physician.
Kevin Hawthorne: And what is your education for the physician? Where did you attend?
Matt Steinberger: I went to Michigan State for my undergraduate and my medical school. And I did my residency training in Chicago.
Kevin Hawthorne: And when did you come back to the state of Michigan and around what year?
Matt Steinberger: 2020. 2020, the 2021 drawing.
Kevin Hawthorne: So how is that coming back to Covid after moving from Chicago? What was that experience like?
Matt Steinberger: I was living on the west side of the state at that point. There had been kind of the initial Covid wave in Chicago. We were very busy at the hospital I worked at. I went to a smaller area in West Michigan. So the initial wave had a lot of sick patients, but it hadn't been as severe. I'm talking to my colleagues there at the time, in the summer of 2020, actually, with not. Does not stand out in my memory as being particularly. Obviously things have gone back to normal, but. Things had some relative normality, especially in area when I was living in. There wasn't a ton of community college prep. Most businesses were were open to at least like outdoor dining and and masking indoors and things like that. And there were. There's a little bit of a sense of normality, I would say.
Kevin Hawthorne: And do you think being in the medical field, did you have a different view of Covid than most people you think? Because I remember in the usual way, there are some people who think like, it's just going to be like something like the Ebola scare from a past couple of years or like I remember the swine flu of it was just going to be like two weeks and it'd be fine. Or did you have a different perspective on that as being in the medical field?
Matt Steinberger: I so it was hard to know. So I had heard about it probably around the same time most people had heard about Covid. It was at that point. It was probably late fall or early winter of 2019. There are reports from China of this illness and things were kind of vague. I don't know. I don't really have a ton of specific memories of the very first time I heard about Covid. Then I remember hearing about Spread to Italy, and then I remember hearing about the first kind of reports in the United States, which were isolated on the West Coast. And then the kind of first vivid memory of hearing about how bad Covid was was when you're assuming as president and people tend to have these networks of people that I went to medical school that are training at different facilities and hearing specifically from people in the Detroit area and people in New York. That ICU was more filling up and the severity of the illness. So prior to that, I guess I should say before that. I have kind of a peripheral connection as a family member. There is some family connection to Italy. So we had heard reports in the second hand about the severity of illness and the shutdowns there. And so I was kind of aware of the degree of severity. I think the disconnect between my perception of it and kind of the patients I was taking care of that probably didn't begin more until late 2020 during that kind of winter spike of Covid. I would think that's probably where the first disconnect came in. So people really. And hope things would return to normal at that point. And they just had, obviously.
Kevin Hawthorne: And just in general, what was it like seeing that big spike in winter?
Matt Steinberger: It was really impressive. The severity of illness of the patients, the number of patients, the stress on the system, the stress on myself and my colleagues, it's really hard to. To describe in a lot of ways. It's not something that I anticipated experiencing in my career. And I have a bias. I was a hospital based doctor, so primary care physicians may have had a more varied view where they saw some of their patients get sick, but most got better, which is obviously the case. But the number of patients who I would never have interacted with who were suddenly very ill in the hospital was was impressive. There was. Yeah, the volume was really kind of scary.
Kevin Hawthorne: And did you feel like it's very sad to seeing it being so scary? Had you ever really experienced anything like that before in your medical field?
Matt Steinberger: No. No one had. I mean, even talking to older, some people had been practicing longer. There was the bad you mentioned the swine flu, the H5n1. In certain areas of the country had. Not even approached. But there are a lot. It was the closest thing people around my age who are practicing medicine have experienced. Older doctors talk about. No. No one had really seen anything like that. Yeah.
Kevin Hawthorne: And you had never anticipated seeing anything close to this?
Matt Steinberger: Well, I guess that's not to. I never. You think about it, I guess. Like you're aware of pandemics and you're aware of things like, you know, 19, 18, and you learn about these things both through life and in medical school. And so I guess you were kind of peripherally aware that, like, something like this could happen, but nothing really prepared you for it. Now, level of population wide illness. So. So I guess that's what I would say. And I know knowing again, this was a once in a century of that right there and been really like this since the 1918 flu pandemic. And so obviously, there have been other severe kind of talked about a little bit H5n1 and things like that. But there was no one around who had experienced anything quite like that.
Kevin Hawthorne: And working with Covid, was there anything that you saw that particularly took you aback that you hadn't expected to see or like just about anything that stood out to you in that time?
Matt Steinberger: I mean, again, it was just the severity of illness and the degree of respiratory failure. So, again, oftentimes people have a lot of medical morbidities. But then in healthy people, every once in a while you see these severe cases. And I think that kind of took me back, really. And I mean. I was still relatively new in my career and severe influenza, but it was more of a rarity. But it obviously happened. I mean, every year we know people pass away from influenza and severe disease and complications related to influenza. But it was just the. The number of people and how sick they were. I think the amount of. Support they required. From my oxygen standpoint, this is really was. It was there wasn't like anything I had seen. Again, pretty new in my career, but not something that I had ever experienced previously.
Kevin Hawthorne: Was there anyone in your direct periphery, whether it be a family member or a patient you were looking after, who had a particularly severe case or passed away?
Matt Steinberger: yeah. A lot of patients passed on.
Kevin Hawthorne: How was that hard to deal with?
Matt Steinberger: Yeah. I mean, it's a strange thing, the process again, in the in the moment there was a little bit of a survival. Is trying to make sure you're taking care of every other patient and trying to help your colleagues take care of people as well as you could. But but, yeah, people are very sick. And so. You know, the processing aspect of it is it's been a longer process. I guess I would say in the moment it was more about I got to take care of everyone. So that's what we tried to do.
Kevin Hawthorne: Would you say you're still processing it to this day?
Matt Steinberger: I don't know. Because in my day to day, I don't I don't think about it. All right? I mean. It's obviously still a part of my life. It's another pair of patients with Covid. Thinking about those really like challenging times during the first wave during March of 2020 and then that second wave in the winter of 2020. It's a lot, but.
Kevin Hawthorne: What is you? Have you seen be the main difference of Covid cases now versus earlier in the pandemic?
Matt Steinberger: It's pretty rare to see someone severely ill, though. I mean, you know. I've seen severe cases in the last year. But, you know, it's it's not a it's nowhere near. I would see that many patients in a week that were that ill. Now that's a year to get to that number if that.
Kevin Hawthorne: What do you think are some misconceptions about Covid that still persist? Maybe.
Matt Steinberger: I don't know. I don't know how to best answer that.
Kevin Hawthorne: That's okay.
Matt Steinberger: I don't want to. I don't have a good answer to that question. I don't. Yeah. No, that's the question.
Kevin Hawthorne: No, that's absolutely.
Matt Steinberger: I don't talk to people on up. Talked to people. I don't survey people on Covid enough to know what people's perception of Covid is at this point versus than when when it all started. And there's so much there's. So much information about Covid. Even from a medical standpoint, that's confusing. Like it's hard to know what the misconception. I don't I don't want to answer that.
Kevin Hawthorne: That is totally fair. Thank you. So obviously, being a doctor and being involved very heavily in these fears, did you contract Covid during the past four years?
Matt Steinberger: I actually just had Covid.
Kevin Hawthorne: So you mean for years?
Matt Steinberger: And then I had a two years ago. There's nothing that you don't have to include that in the interview, but.
Kevin Hawthorne: You know, it could include it.
Matt Steinberger: Now, that was relatively mild for me. I'm a young, healthy person. This time around, the first time I was, I didn't feel well, most probably about a week.
Kevin Hawthorne: So you say, how was I was the first time For the second time.
Matt Steinberger: It was worse. I didn't feel very good the first time. I couldn't really hear that the the protocols have changed, but I couldn't have worked the first time. This time I had to be out of work. But the first time I would not have physically were capable of doing my job. That's how I get. But that's how I quantify how sick I am. Could I work if I needed to? The first time I could. Not that.
Kevin Hawthorne: Absolutely. And thinking about Covid 19, as you said, this was kind of like a once in a century type thing, however. Are you worried?
Matt Steinberger: I guess I should be. I should rephrase that. That was that's how we experience that. But it could happen more often.
Kevin Hawthorne: Yeah. As someone who's worked in the physician field now, are you worried about, like, maybe something like this happening again within our lifetimes?
Matt Steinberger: I. It is something that could happen again in our lifetime. I don't have a good way to quantify and I don't really want to speculate on something like that.
Kevin Hawthorne: Absolutely. And then just overall, how did you feel the response from both on a, you know, local, state level and nationwide level, how do you feel the response was?
Matt Steinberger: It's. It's hard to say. No, no.
End of Track 1
Begin Track 2
Matthew Steinberger: So can you are able to pause it again for a second and.
Kevin Hawthorne: So are there any final things that we haven't discussed on the topic that you would like to have the floor with right now? Is that you there?
Matthew Steinberger: Yeah, I'm here. Can you not see me?
Kevin Hawthorne: You know, I think I have something that my internet is unstable.
Matthew Steinberger: Okay. Anything else I want to share? You know, I don't really think so. Yeah, it was a tough it was a really challenging experience. Was a hard way to start my career. There was a hard. I don't want that. I don't want to say that. It was a it was a hard thing to experience. I can't articulate anything else.
Kevin Hawthorne: No, that's absolutely fair. It was a hard time for everyone, especially I can't imagine being a doctor during this.
Matthew Steinberger: But it was. No, no. You. No, I don't know if I have anything really to laugh to share about the subject. Well.
Matthew Steinberger: All right. Thank you. You are not useless. You were incredibly useful. And I really appreciate you for your time today.
Matthew Steinberger: All right. You're.
Kevin Hawthorne: Hello, this is Kevin Hawthorne with the Detroit Stroke Museum. And I'm here today with.
Matt Steinberger: Matt Steinberger.
Kevin Hawthorne: All right. Thank you so much for joining us today, Matt. Just to start, in, what area do you live in currently?
Matt Steinberger: I currently live in Ann Arbor.
Kevin Hawthorne: And what is your occupation?
Matt Steinberger: I'm a physician not to care about that. I'm a physician.
Kevin Hawthorne: And what is your education for the physician? Where did you attend?
Matt Steinberger: I went to Michigan State for my undergraduate and my medical school. And I did my residency training in Chicago.
Kevin Hawthorne: And when did you come back to the state of Michigan and around what year?
Matt Steinberger: 2020. 2020, the 2021 drawing.
Kevin Hawthorne: So how is that coming back to Covid after moving from Chicago? What was that experience like?
Matt Steinberger: I was living on the west side of the state at that point. There had been kind of the initial Covid wave in Chicago. We were very busy at the hospital I worked at. I went to a smaller area in West Michigan. So the initial wave had a lot of sick patients, but it hadn't been as severe. I'm talking to my colleagues there at the time, in the summer of 2020, actually, with not. Does not stand out in my memory as being particularly. Obviously things have gone back to normal, but. Things had some relative normality, especially in area when I was living in. There wasn't a ton of community college prep. Most businesses were were open to at least like outdoor dining and and masking indoors and things like that. And there were. There's a little bit of a sense of normality, I would say.
Kevin Hawthorne: And do you think being in the medical field, did you have a different view of Covid than most people you think? Because I remember in the usual way, there are some people who think like, it's just going to be like something like the Ebola scare from a past couple of years or like I remember the swine flu of it was just going to be like two weeks and it'd be fine. Or did you have a different perspective on that as being in the medical field?
Matt Steinberger: I so it was hard to know. So I had heard about it probably around the same time most people had heard about Covid. It was at that point. It was probably late fall or early winter of 2019. There are reports from China of this illness and things were kind of vague. I don't know. I don't really have a ton of specific memories of the very first time I heard about Covid. Then I remember hearing about Spread to Italy, and then I remember hearing about the first kind of reports in the United States, which were isolated on the West Coast. And then the kind of first vivid memory of hearing about how bad Covid was was when you're assuming as president and people tend to have these networks of people that I went to medical school that are training at different facilities and hearing specifically from people in the Detroit area and people in New York. That ICU was more filling up and the severity of the illness. So prior to that, I guess I should say before that. I have kind of a peripheral connection as a family member. There is some family connection to Italy. So we had heard reports in the second hand about the severity of illness and the shutdowns there. And so I was kind of aware of the degree of severity. I think the disconnect between my perception of it and kind of the patients I was taking care of that probably didn't begin more until late 2020 during that kind of winter spike of Covid. I would think that's probably where the first disconnect came in. So people really. And hope things would return to normal at that point. And they just had, obviously.
Kevin Hawthorne: And just in general, what was it like seeing that big spike in winter?
Matt Steinberger: It was really impressive. The severity of illness of the patients, the number of patients, the stress on the system, the stress on myself and my colleagues, it's really hard to. To describe in a lot of ways. It's not something that I anticipated experiencing in my career. And I have a bias. I was a hospital based doctor, so primary care physicians may have had a more varied view where they saw some of their patients get sick, but most got better, which is obviously the case. But the number of patients who I would never have interacted with who were suddenly very ill in the hospital was was impressive. There was. Yeah, the volume was really kind of scary.
Kevin Hawthorne: And did you feel like it's very sad to seeing it being so scary? Had you ever really experienced anything like that before in your medical field?
Matt Steinberger: No. No one had. I mean, even talking to older, some people had been practicing longer. There was the bad you mentioned the swine flu, the H5n1. In certain areas of the country had. Not even approached. But there are a lot. It was the closest thing people around my age who are practicing medicine have experienced. Older doctors talk about. No. No one had really seen anything like that. Yeah.
Kevin Hawthorne: And you had never anticipated seeing anything close to this?
Matt Steinberger: Well, I guess that's not to. I never. You think about it, I guess. Like you're aware of pandemics and you're aware of things like, you know, 19, 18, and you learn about these things both through life and in medical school. And so I guess you were kind of peripherally aware that, like, something like this could happen, but nothing really prepared you for it. Now, level of population wide illness. So. So I guess that's what I would say. And I know knowing again, this was a once in a century of that right there and been really like this since the 1918 flu pandemic. And so obviously, there have been other severe kind of talked about a little bit H5n1 and things like that. But there was no one around who had experienced anything quite like that.
Kevin Hawthorne: And working with Covid, was there anything that you saw that particularly took you aback that you hadn't expected to see or like just about anything that stood out to you in that time?
Matt Steinberger: I mean, again, it was just the severity of illness and the degree of respiratory failure. So, again, oftentimes people have a lot of medical morbidities. But then in healthy people, every once in a while you see these severe cases. And I think that kind of took me back, really. And I mean. I was still relatively new in my career and severe influenza, but it was more of a rarity. But it obviously happened. I mean, every year we know people pass away from influenza and severe disease and complications related to influenza. But it was just the. The number of people and how sick they were. I think the amount of. Support they required. From my oxygen standpoint, this is really was. It was there wasn't like anything I had seen. Again, pretty new in my career, but not something that I had ever experienced previously.
Kevin Hawthorne: Was there anyone in your direct periphery, whether it be a family member or a patient you were looking after, who had a particularly severe case or passed away?
Matt Steinberger: yeah. A lot of patients passed on.
Kevin Hawthorne: How was that hard to deal with?
Matt Steinberger: Yeah. I mean, it's a strange thing, the process again, in the in the moment there was a little bit of a survival. Is trying to make sure you're taking care of every other patient and trying to help your colleagues take care of people as well as you could. But but, yeah, people are very sick. And so. You know, the processing aspect of it is it's been a longer process. I guess I would say in the moment it was more about I got to take care of everyone. So that's what we tried to do.
Kevin Hawthorne: Would you say you're still processing it to this day?
Matt Steinberger: I don't know. Because in my day to day, I don't I don't think about it. All right? I mean. It's obviously still a part of my life. It's another pair of patients with Covid. Thinking about those really like challenging times during the first wave during March of 2020 and then that second wave in the winter of 2020. It's a lot, but.
Kevin Hawthorne: What is you? Have you seen be the main difference of Covid cases now versus earlier in the pandemic?
Matt Steinberger: It's pretty rare to see someone severely ill, though. I mean, you know. I've seen severe cases in the last year. But, you know, it's it's not a it's nowhere near. I would see that many patients in a week that were that ill. Now that's a year to get to that number if that.
Kevin Hawthorne: What do you think are some misconceptions about Covid that still persist? Maybe.
Matt Steinberger: I don't know. I don't know how to best answer that.
Kevin Hawthorne: That's okay.
Matt Steinberger: I don't want to. I don't have a good answer to that question. I don't. Yeah. No, that's the question.
Kevin Hawthorne: No, that's absolutely.
Matt Steinberger: I don't talk to people on up. Talked to people. I don't survey people on Covid enough to know what people's perception of Covid is at this point versus than when when it all started. And there's so much there's. So much information about Covid. Even from a medical standpoint, that's confusing. Like it's hard to know what the misconception. I don't I don't want to answer that.
Kevin Hawthorne: That is totally fair. Thank you. So obviously, being a doctor and being involved very heavily in these fears, did you contract Covid during the past four years?
Matt Steinberger: I actually just had Covid.
Kevin Hawthorne: So you mean for years?
Matt Steinberger: And then I had a two years ago. There's nothing that you don't have to include that in the interview, but.
Kevin Hawthorne: You know, it could include it.
Matt Steinberger: Now, that was relatively mild for me. I'm a young, healthy person. This time around, the first time I was, I didn't feel well, most probably about a week.
Kevin Hawthorne: So you say, how was I was the first time For the second time.
Matt Steinberger: It was worse. I didn't feel very good the first time. I couldn't really hear that the the protocols have changed, but I couldn't have worked the first time. This time I had to be out of work. But the first time I would not have physically were capable of doing my job. That's how I get. But that's how I quantify how sick I am. Could I work if I needed to? The first time I could. Not that.
Kevin Hawthorne: Absolutely. And thinking about Covid 19, as you said, this was kind of like a once in a century type thing, however. Are you worried?
Matt Steinberger: I guess I should be. I should rephrase that. That was that's how we experience that. But it could happen more often.
Kevin Hawthorne: Yeah. As someone who's worked in the physician field now, are you worried about, like, maybe something like this happening again within our lifetimes?
Matt Steinberger: I. It is something that could happen again in our lifetime. I don't have a good way to quantify and I don't really want to speculate on something like that.
Kevin Hawthorne: Absolutely. And then just overall, how did you feel the response from both on a, you know, local, state level and nationwide level, how do you feel the response was?
Matt Steinberger: It's. It's hard to say. No, no.
End of Track 1
Begin Track 2
Matthew Steinberger: So can you are able to pause it again for a second and.
Kevin Hawthorne: So are there any final things that we haven't discussed on the topic that you would like to have the floor with right now? Is that you there?
Matthew Steinberger: Yeah, I'm here. Can you not see me?
Kevin Hawthorne: You know, I think I have something that my internet is unstable.
Matthew Steinberger: Okay. Anything else I want to share? You know, I don't really think so. Yeah, it was a tough it was a really challenging experience. Was a hard way to start my career. There was a hard. I don't want that. I don't want to say that. It was a it was a hard thing to experience. I can't articulate anything else.
Kevin Hawthorne: No, that's absolutely fair. It was a hard time for everyone, especially I can't imagine being a doctor during this.
Matthew Steinberger: But it was. No, no. You. No, I don't know if I have anything really to laugh to share about the subject. Well.
Matthew Steinberger: All right. Thank you. You are not useless. You were incredibly useful. And I really appreciate you for your time today.
Matthew Steinberger: All right. You're.
Collection
Citation
“Matthew Steinberger,” Detroit Historical Society Oral History Archive, accessed November 5, 2024, https://detroit1967.detroithistorical.org/items/show/1073.