Dr. Glenn Wakam

Until Sunday night, TigerBlog had never spoken to Glenn Wakam.

He was the public address announcer who informed the 9,483 fans at Princeton Stadium back on Nov. 14, 2009, that it was in fact Wakam who had intercepted a pass in the fourth quarter of a game against Yale.

At the time, Princeton was ahead 21-17 with six minutes to play. Wakam's pick set up a field goal, and the final was Princeton 24, Yale 17.

That was essentially the extent of TB's interaction with Wakam until the two texted last week and then spoke Sunday. Since then, TB has learned a lot about Glenn Wakam, and all of it has been impressive.

Glenn Wakam is now a surgical resident, in the fourth year of a seven-year program that will see him become a transplant surgeon. He is doing his residency in the Detroit area.

For almost a year he'd also been working some shifts in local community hospitals in their ICUs, doing basic patient care, to pick up extra money on nights and weekends. What happened next was not what he expected at all.

Into those community hospital ICUs flooded a bunch of COVID-19 patients, and suddenly he was at the center one of the largest outbreaks in the country. The experience accelerated his education, that's for sure.

TigerBlog has already written about other former Princeton athletes who are now doctors and who have been thrown into the fight against the virus. There was the story of Evan Garfein, a 1992 NCAA champion men's lacrosse player, and then Liza Hartofilis, who won a pair of NCAA titles (in 2002 and 2003) with the women's team.

Both Garfein and Hartofilis have been working in New York City. Garfein actually caught the virus, recovered and went back to work in the ER.

TB's fear in writing about Wakam was that he'd be writing the same story all over again. In almost any other case, that wouldn't be something he'd like to do.

In these days, he can't tell the story enough.

You have former Princeton athletes out there - beyond just these three - who are doing so much to treat people during these awful times. Every one of them is doing something heroic, even if they wouldn't admit it.

Their stories are all the same, and yet they're also unique.

In Wakam's case, he's the son of immigrants from Cameroon, his mother a doctor and his father a chemical engineer. He grew up in Southern California, excelled athletically and academically, came to Princeton and played four years of football (starting at cornerback on Bob Surace's first team) and then went to medical school at the University of California at San Francisco.

You can read the whole story HERE.

There other links at the top of the story, one that will take you to a podcast featuring Wakam in which he talks about an issue that he clearly has a great deal of passion for, the way that the virus has been disproportionately affecting minority communities, and then another link to a story he wrote that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Those are both worth your time.

This is from the NEJM story:

My patient’s wife arrives at the emergency department at 1:30 a.m., despite having been told she would not be allowed to see her husband. I go to meet her, and we discuss her husband’s continued decline. Unfortunately, in the middle of the conversation, a Code Blue rings from the overhead speaker for a patient in the ICU. I step away and find myself entering her husband’s room, where CPR is already in progress.

After 90 minutes of CPR, epinephrine, and defibrillations, my patient still has not regained a sustained pulse. I somberly call time of death. One of the nurses in the hallway has been in contact with the wife throughout the process and has informed her of the death; she now has the wife on FaceTime so that she can see her husband. When she recognizes him in the distorted image, she lets out a wail of sorrow. She is in the midst of her final goodbyes when I have to excuse myself from the room: another patient with Covid-19 is deteriorating a few rooms over.

This is what he's been dealing with. What they've all been dealing with.

Their stories are amazing, even if they are somewhat similar.

And as TB has said before, they're all heroic. They are the very best of Princeton Athletics.