Wilderness medicine fellows return to lend a hand
Brian Strickland was high up in the Himalayas, walking around a rustic clinic a day’s hike from Mount Everest. He was trying to find a cellphone signal strong enough to get email and news from home as the coronavirus outbreak was evolving from being viewed as a crisis largely focused in central China to a global pandemic centered on the U.S. Strickland would be on a helicopter to Kathmandu within days, the first leg of his trip back to Massachusetts, where he’d witness the rapid escalation of the COVID-19 epidemic from the intimate point of view of an emergency room physician. Within weeks, he’d be heading a Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) clinical trial exploring the use of inhaled nitric oxide — a therapy built on knowledge gained high in Himalayas — to rapidly kill coronavirus in the lungs. “Yesterday was my first full day off in a stretch of 10 days of...