For infectious disease doctor in war against COVID-19, it’s a family affair
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Bringing the Fight
Get to know some of the heroes among us leading the effort to combat COVID-19 in a special section published by the Lexington Herald-Leader and Kentucky.com. Read about them in the May 3, 2020, edition of the newspaper or click below to read the stories published online so far.
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He should have been enjoying himself on a once-in-a-lifetime cruise of New Zealand and Australia with a friend from the world of infectious disease medicine, but Dr. Mark Dougherty’s mind was over 11,000 miles away.
“We were two days into the cruise and I got very agitated when I saw what was happening in Italy,” Dougherty said recently. “I couldn’t focus on anything. I was on my cell phone all the time. I couldn’t really eat or enjoy anything. We were like, ‘What the heck are we going to do.’”
COVID-19 was happening in Italy. The coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China, was alarming, Italy even more so. Infections were multiplying. Hospitals were overwhelmed. Agonizing decisions were being made about which patients would be put on ventilators and which would be left to die.
“So finally,” said Dougherty, “I decided to get off the cruise early in a small town in New Zealand and fly back.”
It took six hours and $4,000 to change plane tickets and an itinerary from Auckland to Los Angeles to Chicago to Cincinnati before Dougherty arrived in Lexington at 2:30 on a Sunday morning. The next day, he saw one of his first patients, Lexington native and University of Louisville medical student Anna Downs, a 26-year-old who had tested positive.
“And we’ve been working ever since,” said Dougherty of Lexington Infectious Disease Consultants, an independent practice that deals with all the local hospitals except for the University of Kentucky Hospital. In practice for 32 years himself, Dougherty is the hospital epidemiologist at Baptist Health Hospital. His parter, Dr. Charles Kennedy, is the hospital epidemiologist at St. Joseph’s Hospital.
What’s unique about Dougherty’s practice is the family practice. Son David is among the 11 doctors. Son Joey is the practice’s office manager. Daughter Pauline works in the office in an administrative capacity. Their mother, Natasha, is a nurse practitioner.
In all, Mark and Natasha Dougherty have six children. Besides the three that work in the office, son William is a facial plastic surgeon in Norfolk, Virginia. Son Michael just finished medical school at the University of Virginia — where his father also went — and is “holed up” in Lexington with his fiancee during the pandemic. Daughter Julia is married and living in South Africa with the Doughertys’ grandson.
“It’s going to be very difficult to see him for awhile,” said the grandfather, “because the whole country is in lockdown.”
Meanwhile, back in Lexington, Dougherty is fighting what he calls a “war,” the same kind of war he saw as a young medical student. After less-than-perfect eyesight kept him from being an Air Force pilot like his father, the late Joseph Dougherty of Glasgow, Mark decided to go to medical school. He then trained at the University of Rochester (N.Y.) under Dr. Raphael Dolin, a leading authority on infectious disease.
“Infectious disease, it was always something new and exciting,” Dougherty said. “I liked disease processes that looked like they were one thing but were actually something else when it was hidden. And you had to figure out the puzzle to get people better.”
With Dolin, Dougherty was on the cutting edge of the AIDs epidemic in the 1980s as Rochester had one of the first HIV clinical trial groups. People were flying between Rochester and the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, to get more information about the new and scary infectious disease.
“When AIDs started, no one knew what was going on, we just saw that people were dying,” Dougherty said. “And when I was a resident, people were afraid to go in the rooms. They didn’t know if they would get it themselves. Didn’t know what kind of personal protective equipment they needed because no one knew how it was transmitted. People would say, ‘I’m not going in there to take care of that patient because I might get sick and take it back to my family.’ Of course it didn’t end up being that way, it wasn’t transmitted in that fashion but that’s what was happening in the beginning.”
Similar things have happened with the mysteries of COVID-19. Early on, some patients died before test results arrived. Others died from conditions that did not present initially as the virus.
“We’ve learned a huge amount in a short period of time,” said Dougherty. “The main thing has been how do we get through this together? Teamwork. Let’s get a move on here. We’re not hopeless and helpless. We can do something to fight back.”
They have been fighting back. For example, Dougherty and the team at Baptist Health were the first to use convalescent plasma from a recovered patient to treat sick patients. (Anna Downs was among the first donors.) They are in the process of trying other treatments they believe can be of benefit and are always on the lookout for more.
“It’s an immensely complex disease. It’s hard to imagine how it could have been more complicated than this,” Dougherty said, but added, “I think we’ve really pulled together more as a community. As a health care community we certainly have, pulling together all over the state, doing things we’ve never done before.”
And it must be especially satisfying to be doing it with so many family members involved. “It’s been an incredible blessing,” said Dougherty. “Unbelievably gratifying.”
It’s far from over, of course. As Dougherty points out, there have been pandemics before and there will be plenty more to come. A specialized area that has not always received much attention, infectious disease doctors are now in demand, and that doesn’t figure to change anytime soon.
“Our message has been you can’t lay down flat and do nothing,” said Dougherty. “This is a war and we’re going to win this war. We’re going to fight back.”
This story was originally published May 5, 2020 at 7:28 AM.
