Medicine and the unconscious

Abstract

One morning, in the early days of the first COVID-19 surge in the northeast USA, a colleague left the hospital after a busy stretch in the intensive care unit. It had not been an easy night, but he had seen worse. He pulled over at a grocery store on the way home and walked inside the familiar building's sliding glass doors, looked around at the half-stocked shelves and crowded aisles and had the first panic attack of his life.