HJBR Mar/Apr 2022

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF BATON ROUGE I  MAR / APR 2022 15 information gets shared through the right channels. Editor How have you protected your men- tal health during the pandemic? On the darkest days, what gave you light? Thomas I am very much a believer of try- ing to focus on my own health. As far as my physical health, I exercise virtually every single day. I use that as my time to center myself and to release positive endorphins into my body when I do my workout. So, whether we’re going through the pandemic or hurricanes or whatever, I continue to do those workouts because it’s really part of my routine on how I’ve been able to manage my own stress during this time. I’d also say I have an incredible team around me who have been an amazing sup- port and, frankly, helped make my job easy as we’ve gone through this. They’ve been the real heroes and have done incredible work, whether it’s our infectious disease specialists like Sandy Kemmerly and Kathy Baumgarten or the folks that run our opera- tions every day like Robert Hart andMichael Hulefeld or the team that is working on our finances and making sure we keep our fed- eral funding and FEMA claims straight, Pete November and Frank Bocklud and his team, or our team in HR, Tracy Schiro and her whole team that work on what’s going on from an HR perspective. We just have incredible people who do incredible things. And then there’s folks that stepped up like our academic officer, Dr. Leo Seoane, and his teamwho created a model in the beginning of COVID to help us predict what the inpa- tient census would be for COVID patients 14 to 21 days out, so we could estimate what that was going to look like. We didn’t have that when we started COVID, and he and his teamwent and created it. These are the folks that just have been incredible. Literally, hun- dreds and thousands of more other people have just made it come together. I’m very fortunate to be able to lead an incredibly talented team, to work with incredible physicians who have worked tirelessly to take care of patients day in and day out, frankly, without a lot of com- plaining over the past couple of years. Con- cerns, questions, needed clarification ... but whether it was going through a hurricane or going through another surge or taking on another challenge, folks are just like, “OK, it’s what we’ve got to do. We’ve got to take care of patients, take care of our commu- nity. How can we help each other?”It’s been extremely rewarding to watch, and I can’t say enough positive things about our phy- sicians, our nurses, our clinicians, all of our administrative folks, our management team, my executive team, and our board who have been extremely supportive. They have done an incredible job guiding us through this. My board chair, Andy Wisdom, I talked to virtually weekly going through this, and he