Facing Fatality
/Dr. Bret Craytor persevered through the pandemic
By Ellen Orr
Intensivist Bret Craytor saw the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Though nothing could have adequately prepared him for the tragedy of the crisis, Bret faced crises throughout his career as a medical doctor, and these experiences positioned him well to lead the team caring for the most severe COVID patients.
A native of Albuquerque, New Mexico, Bret and his family moved around a lot before landing Broken Bow, Oklahoma. While Bret was in high school, his father underwent open-heart surgery. His dad, himself an electrical engineer, had always encouraged him to pursue scientific knowledge. And, watching Bret in the wake of his father’s heart surgery, his mother “saw that medicine was my calling,” he said.
So, with his parents’ support, Bret entered into the field of medicine. After earning an undergraduate degree in chemistry, he entered medical school, all at the University of Oklahoma (located in Norman, south of Oklahoma City). After an internship and residency in internal medicine, he moved to Idabel, where he opened a private practice and became a local medical examiner for the State of Oklahoma.
In 1993, Bret and his partner, DeAnna, were married, and they moved back to Norman so that Bret could accept a fellowship in pulmonary disease and critical care. During his fellowship, two life-changing events occurred: his eldest child, Collin was born, and the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was bombed. Bret’s experience as medical examiner primed him to volunteer at the scene of the bombing and for the two weeks following.
In 1996, Bret, DeAnna, and Collin moved to Texarkana, and Bret started a private practice in pulmonary disease and critical care medicine. The first day his practice was open, Bret’s second son, Carson, was born. In 2010, Bret made the shift to hospital-based critical care medicine, accepting a job at CHRISTUS St. Michael.
Since 2012, Bret has served the hospital as the program medical director of the intensive care service. St. Michael’s ICU has 32 beds, though “I am called to see patients just about anywhere in the hospital,” Bret explained: “admitting them from the emergency room, accepting direct transfers from other facilities, as well as seeing patients on the other floors of the hospital and transferring them to the ICU if need be. Sometimes we provide care to prevent the need for transfer to the ICU.”
When the COVID-19 pandemic reached Texarkana, Bret and his team did not know what to expect. “There were so many unknowns initially,” he recalled. “Just like all other hospitals, we worked hard to meet the demands of our community and also to offer care to other communities if we had a bed available. We struggled as everybody else did with supply shortages, as well as medication shortages and staffing issues.”
Though every hospital worker was affected by the pandemic, as the intensivist program by definition cares for patients with the most severe illness, and so Bret and his team experienced the most horrible realities of the novel coronavirus firsthand.
“I did get burnt out, and to this day, I shudder at the thought of another pandemic.”
“Since we were taking care of the sickest of the sick, most of the patients who expired with COVID in our hospital were in the intensive care unit setting receiving care from my team,” he said. “This hurts every healthcare worker associated with those patients. We worked diligently to provide respect and dignity to every patient that we cared for. We would not let them die alone. Oftentimes, we could tell that we were not winning the battle for life with the virus. And although our facility had an overall better than national average mortality rate, we had a significant amount of mortality. It taxes the soul of a healthcare worker.”
The entire intensivist team worked long days and nights to ensure patients received the best possible care. “We all extended our hours of work to make sure everyone got the care they deserved to the best of our abilities,” he recalled. “Our team was stretched very thin. Yet, we hung in there doing the best that we could for our patients.”
To survive the crisis, Bret leaned on his religion, family, and colleagues. Though he did not come out of the pandemic unscathed—“I did get burnt out, and to this day, I shudder at the thought of another pandemic,” he said—his faith, his wife and children, and the other providers at CHRISTUS offered him the support and comfort he needed to persevere.
Bret leaned heavily on his family during the pandemic.
Dr. Bret Craytor still serves the community as director of the intensivist program at St. Michael’s, where he leads a multidisciplinary team committed to “focusing on each individual patient and providing evidence-based care,” he said.