Health care heroes: Meet Dr. Geoffrey Lifferth, chief medical officer at Sumner Regional

What Dr. Geoffrey Lifferth's eyes saw, his heart felt.

He couldn't unsee it. He couldn't unfeel it.

A COVID-19 outbreak in nursing homes across Tennessee, including the one in Gallatin, "was baffling to us as physicians; we didn't fully understand what is happening," said Lifferth, the chief medical officer for Sumner Regional Medical Center. 

Neither did elderly patients, their faces painted with panic.

"Picture your grandma's nursing home," Lifferth said. "She comes in, people are dressed in spacesuits. She's deathly ill. They were scared to death.

"Under normal circumstances you'd have a case manager giving them a hug there, they'd have family at their bedside. They were by themselves, critically ill. There were so many things about that that were heartbreaking."

Lifferth has been at the forefront of the pandemic since February and is in charge of COVID-19 planning, among many other things.

Before Tennessee had a recorded COVID-19 case, Lifferth was following the news – a confirmed case in Washington, another in New York, even more in China and Italy.

He approached the Sumner medical center's CEO, Susan Peach and told her, "This is really happening." Peach told him to do what he thought necessary to prepare.

Preparing for the unknown

Lifferth had no playbook. He'd been following closely the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and World Health Organization reports, trying to make sense of what it might mean.

With the help of many others, Lifferth helped convert an old, unused part of the hospital into another emergency room with an isolation unit.

"We're doing this, we haven't seen a single COVID patient," said Lifferth, who grew up in Antioch and has worked for Sumner for 16 years.

Lifferth would go home some days and tell his wife of 27 years, Kate, that he wasn't sure if he and the hospital were doing the right thing. He wondered if they were overreacting.

Lifferth spent so much time – often seven days at week – at work he felt like a resident again. The day the project was completed, during the last week of March, the hospital admitted its first COVID-19 patient.

"It was like taking the tape off the paint and it's like, 'We've got a positive,'" he said. 

'A real gut check'

One patient soon turned to two. Then came the nursing home outbreak. And the outbreak at the Tyson chicken processing plant in Shelbyville. And another at the prison in Hartsville.

In a span of 10 days, two patients turned into 100.

"It was a real gut check," Lifferth said. "I signed up for this. I've definitely had my scary moments in the emergency department, where someone's been shot and we're worried that person (who did the shooting) might come to the ER. We had previous infectious scares, like H1N1. But this one was really different."

Lifferth has seen a lot of COVID patients, he said. He put a chest tube into one whose lung had collapsed. It was a procedure Lifferth had performed many times during his 20-year career in emergency medicine.

This time was different.

"I look down and my hands were shaking," he said. "I'm right next to the patient, they're getting bagged ... and fluid came out."

Lifferth was wearing a gown and a shield and an N95 mask and two pairs of gloves.

"It's scary," he said.

Liffert and his wife have five children, two of whom still live at home. There was concern about exposing his family. There was discussion about quarantining in different parts of the house.

'Off on an island'

As Lifferth sees it, pretty much everybody is in the same boat when it comes to the pandemic.

Which is precisely why he loaded his son and some of his friends onto the wooden sailboat he built and headed for an island on Percy Priest Lake for some fishing, camping and, most importantly, an escape.

"After living in the hospital for two months, it was so nice," Lifferth said. "We had a fire on the beach. I slept in my hammock. It was right off the cover of a catalog."

Then it was right back to reality for Lifferth, who completed his undergraduate studies at Brigham Young University, medical school at Tennessee and was a resident at Harvard.

"It's scary," he said. "There's just so much unknown. Having worked in a hospital, we've seen people die. It's just a different situation. Every day it's like, 'Is this going to be the day I'm exposed, and what's going to be the consequence? Am I going to be a mild case or am I going to end up like one of the people I'm seeing?'"

Lifferth said he has little time to worry about that, though. 

"I'm of the camp that I wash my hands, I wear PPE," he said. "I'm of the camp that most of us are going to be exposed, so we've kind of taken that part in stride." 

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Reach Paul Skrbina at pskrbina@tennessean.com and follow him on Twitter @PaulSkrbina.