Note: The Nocturnists is created primarily as a listening experience. The audio contains emotion, emphasis, and soundscapes that are not easily transcribed. Our transcripts are produced using both speech recognition software and human copy editors, and may not be 100% accurate. Thank you for consulting the audio before quoting in print.

Emily Silverman: Support for The Nocturnists comes from the California Medical Association

Speaker: At The Nocturnists, we are careful to ensure that all stories comply with healthcare privacy laws. Details may have been changed to ensure patient confidentiality. All these expressed are those of the person speaking and not their employer. [music]

Emily: This is The Nocturnists: Conversations. I'm Emily Silverman. Today I'm joined by Corey Feist, cofounder of the Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes' Foundation, and brother-in-law of Dr. Lorna Breen, the New York City emergency physician who became a national icon after she died by suicide in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Corey has dedicated the past five years to honoring Lorna's legacy, transforming her story into a catalyst for change. Through his leadership, the foundation helped pass the Dr. Lorna Breen Healthcare Provider Protection Act, created national programs supporting clinician well-being, and continues to advocate for systemic reform in healthcare.

In my conversation with Corey, we discuss the personal and emotional journey of turning profound loss into a national movement for change, how the Lorna Breen Act is reshaping the way our country supports the mental health of healthcare workers, and the ongoing fight to dismantle stigma and barriers so clinicians can seek the help they need without fear. I hope you find this conversation as moving and inspiring as I did, but first listen to Corey read an excerpt from a doctor's emergency, a powerful essay in Vanity Fair about his sister in law, Dr. Lorna Breen.

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Corey Feist: Each year in March, Dr. Lorna Breen would join her sister, Jennifer Feist, family for a spring break trip. This year's destination was Big Sky, Montana. The medical director of the emergency department at Upper Manhattan's New York Presbyterian Allen Hospital, and an assistant professor at Columbia University, Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, Breen had a reputation for tireless work and adventurous spirits. She once traveled to Croatia to study for medical board exams, to make a working vacation out of it.

Tall and athletic, with a bright grin, Breen arrived in Big Sky on March 8th, when New York City had 13 confirmed cases of COVID-19. For five days, she snowboarded, and her family skied, while keeping an eye on the news and excusing herself for phone calls with colleagues. Breen took her 12-year-old on a black diamond ski run that week. She discussed her upcoming 50th birthday over wine in the hot tub with her sister. Breen also talked about the pandemic with Feist. Infectious disease was not an uncommon topic for them. Feist's 16-year-old son had been hospitalized at age 6 when he contracted swine flu during the H1N1 epidemic in 2009.

During the 2014 Ebola outbreak, in which a New York Presbyterian Columbia physician had been infected, the sisters discussed the risks that first responders face when asked to contain an unfamiliar illness. She started saying things like, "This is really bad. This country isn't ready. We don't have the supplies. We don't have the protocols." Feist said of conversing about COVID-19 with Breen. The doctor left Big Sky on March 13. She loaded her things into a rental car and hugged her family goodbye. We basically just said, "Good luck. Keep us posted." Feist said, when we first spoke in May, "In retrospect, I wish I had said, 'Here's an idea. Quit your job right now.'"

Breen returned to work on March 14, the day New York officials confirmed the city's first COVID-19 death. Over the next six weeks, the city's death rate would spike to six times its normal level. Some days, New Yorkers would call 911 at rates surpassing those of the September 11 attacks, pushing emergency systems and personnel past their limits. Breen, who had a reputation for calm under pressure and no known history of mental illness, would suffer a mental health crisis. She died by suicide, April 26.

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Emily: I am sitting here with the wonderful Corey. Feist. Corey, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Corey: Thank you, and I really appreciate the opportunity to sit with the wonderful Emily Silverman.

Emily: Corey, we were just talking offline about this piece from Vanity Fair that you just read aloud from, and you were remarking that it's been a while since you've read the piece. Since you've really, I guess, gone back to that moment in a way, I'm sure you've talked about Lorna all the time. You talk about what happened to her every day, but I'm just wondering, returning to that piece for the first time in a while, how is that for you?

Corey: It's hard. I have given about 275 keynotes in the last five years, thousands of media interviews, probably a couple of hundred podcasts. At the beginning of doing this work, I certainly told Lorna's story more times than I cared to. When I told it, I would tell it in a truncated way to do some self-preservation, just because it's hard. Going back to that piece, which takes us play by play, it really returns me to that week when life was normal.

Emily: Tell us about the quick reaction time. My understanding, having followed your journey over the last few years, is that this tragedy happened, and actually, the response time to

getting this organization up and running was fairly quick. Maybe you can bring us into that, getting the news of what happened, processing that news as a family, and then springing into action.

Corey: I think it's helpful to understand that at the time that Lorna died, I had been working in an academic health system as one of their executive leaders for a couple of decades, first as an attorney, then I was the CEO of what's called the University of Virginia Physicians Group, which employs the physicians and advanced practice professionals who will work in the UVA system. I had been very keenly aware of the operational challenges, that there's pebbles in the shoe, but they're much more than pebbles in the shoe, as they would say, that get between clinicians and their patients. I was working on it quite extensively at the time of Lorna's death.

With that as background and also his background, both my wife, Jennifer, Lorna's little sister, and I are attorneys. Actually, was 11 hours after she died, the New York Times published her cause of death over our objection. I know you've done a beautiful series on shame. We had shame. We had all of the feelings when someone takes their life, plus shock. This was this 49-year-old physician who was getting her MBA, who was at the top of her game, and all of a sudden she's gone.

I like to say that there were, in retrospect, two very important and positive things that came from that initial publicity. The first was that, that New York Times' initial coverage, and then the subsequent coverage, catalyzed just a tsunami of feedback that came at us. It wasn't your traditional sorry for your loss. There was that in there, but it was heavily sharing in a very personal way, similar experiences, stigma, shame, all of the things that you talk about so beautifully in your work, and real concerns about repercussions like Lorna

had for getting mental health treatment, taking care of oneself.

That was really important feedback, and that absolutely catalyzed the foundation. If we had not heard from people about it, we would have just kept going in our normal lives, because we wouldn't have understood this issue that, for me, was hidden in plain sight for my whole professional career, because I didn't train as a clinician, I didn't know that deep culture.

Then the second good thing that happened was that US Senator Tim Kaine, who's our Virginia senator, contacted us, and he started to draw parallels between what his son's experience in the Marine Corps was, and hoping, frankly, that there would be similar infrastructure to support the mental health of health workers. Then he went in with his

team, as well as about, I don't know, at the end of it was probably 80 different interdisciplinary organizations in healthcare, crafted the Dr. Lorna Breen Healthcare Provider Protection Act, which is this first federal law that creates programs to support the well-being of health workers.

If those two things don't happen, if we don't get the feedback, and we don't have our US senator calling us and saying, "We got to do something for health workers," I don't think we would be having this conversation, to be honest with you. Then, as we sat there, and as the world started to really experience COVID, we felt like we just had to act and do something. We didn't know what we were gonna do. It was very anti to my law degree and my business degree to not have a plan down to the eighth decimal point, if you will. We just felt like we couldn't ignore it, Emily. It was in the news, also. It was the media cycle.

I always thought, frankly, media cycles are short, so you have to act quickly. It was incredibly painful to do that, I should say, to tell her story, particularly when it was that fresh, and try to make something out of this. Frankly, we just knew that media cycles and attention are short-lived. Now, this media cycle, in some ways, lasted for many years, which I think really helped to support the work underpinning the foundation as well as the law we helped create.

Emily: I think I remember you showing me a video clip of you and your family sitting on a news organization taping. I think you were playing the clip, and you pointed to yourself in the clip, and you said, "Emily, that was filmed not more than 24 hours after I found out." Then this news clip goes viral, and then you start to receive the feedback. Tell us about those very, very early days. Were you getting emails to your personal email address, or how were people contacting you, and who wasn't?

Corey: It was all of those things. Interestingly, one of Lorna's friends was a former New York Times reporter. She had actually called us to say, "Hey, you don't know me. I'm sorry for your loss, and this is about to happen." We attempted to fight the Times unsuccessfully. As the story came out, Jennifer and I felt that we did not want to sensationalize a suicide. We wanted to tell the story of this amazing physician who was struck down in her prime, and warn the country and health workers at the time.

Because, remember, New York was basically ground zero for this pandemic, and we're-- particularly, when we saw what COVID did to Lorna's cognition, frankly, as a healthcare leader at the time, I'm going, "We need to have protocols for re-entry after clinicians go out with COVID. We need to protect them, and we need to tell Lorna story, because she was so much more than a sensationalized suicide."

What you're referring to was the Today show episode that we recorded about 36 hours after she died. We did it because my front lawn was a-- you're a little younger than me, but we saw this movie, ET, back in the day, and I just remember there was a part of ET where there's the satellite, the news reporters all load up on the little boy's front lawn. My front lawn looked like that. They were knocking on the door. They were leaving notes on the door. We were in my home with my 82-year-old mother-in-law, grieving, with the windows' shades down, feeling like we can't go anywhere because our home was being surrounded, literally.

Then, yes, it was emails and phone calls and text messages. It's amazing how your phone number gets around, but that was it. When I think back to that decision that Jennifer made to do the Today show, it was really because we had some very close, childhood close friends, who were very close friends with Savannah Guthrie from law school. We had actually met Savannah when she was in law school. Jennifer felt like she would be incredibly respectful and thoughtful, and be willing to tell the real story.

It was very, very overwhelming. In fact, there's a gentleman whose name I don't know anymore, who was also an indirect friend of Lorna, who does public relations, who I remember, he said, "Corey, I will act as your switchboard operator." I thought, "What is that?" He was working, obviously, over to his home. He was working from his home in New York City, and he was just trying to help me stack up all these requests and figure out what we were going to do.

For Jennifer, once she did the Today show, she was done. She was like, "I'm out. I'm not doing this anymore." I did a lot of the other media outlets on behalf of the family, just because the family, of which I'm a member, by the way, obviously, was really struggling to have any conversations externally.

Emily: I'm sure in the outpouring, a lot of it was more media requests and things like that. It sounds like there were also just ordinary folks out there in the world, doctors, nurses, other clinicians, loved ones of clinicians, who were reaching out and saying me too in a way, like, "Me too, I am struggling. Me too. I am suicidal, or have been suicidal," or, "I I'm a clinician and I'm afraid to seek mental health care because I'm worried I'll lose my job." Was it that kind of thing, or was it actually-- because here the pandemic was still in its early throes, was it more like, "Help us. Get us PPE." Was it more that too, or what was the quality of the messages?

Corey: The messages, Emily, lasted for three years without a stop.

Emily: Wow.

Corey: For three solid years after her death, every single day, I heard from somebody I didn't know the day before. I still get those messages. It's just not every day. It's now probably a couple of times a month. The messages are all that first category. It's families and loved ones of clinicians. It's parents of future clinicians. I remember a father, who is a physician, whose I think it was daughter was going to medical school, and he said, "I'm terrified for her."

It was those messages. It was physicians that I had known for decades, who shared with me that, "If you look at my CV, it says I did this fellowship for two years. Actually, I needed inpatient psychiatric treatment because of what I was experiencing as a resident at that time." It was at that time when I began to learn that the suicide rate of physicians is twice that of the general population, and it's higher for female physicians than men. These were facts that I should have, frankly, been very well aware of as the CEO of the University of Virginia Physicians Group, but just that these were not topics that were discussed ever.

I began to learn all of this, which is, again, why we-- it was that level of feedback and that level of specificity, as well as pointing to licensing questions that they were being asked and credentialing questions that they were being asked, or insurance applications they were having to fill out, where it just occurred to me that there's a minefield that health workers have to navigate here when it comes to just simply taking care of oneself, which, in today's environment, is ridiculous and absurd.

When they started to point, particularly as a lawyer, to the real, tangible things, I'm like, "Okay, these are concrete things that we can fix." We've made huge progress fixing them, albeit we have a long way to go, but we have great momentum. It was that kind of feedback, Emily, it was all really focused on the mental health support and just being able to be treated as humans in this very, very intense profession.

Emily: When you get a call from a US senator who wants to build some legislation together, what is that process like? Because I imagine you were working with Tim in concert with getting the Lorna Breen Healthcare Heroes' Foundation up and running. Tell us about that parallel processing, like you're getting the papers together to get the foundation, you're

working with Tim. What was the first few things that you did?

Corey: Working with Senator Kaine and the whole policy apparatus of the United States was something that I had just dabbled in in my early days at the University of Virginia, where I did a little bit of policy work, did a few hill visits. It was really amazing because what Senator Kaine said was, "Give me your ideas, Corey." I often have said, not sure he knew I was in the healthcare leader and lawyer when he asked me that question, because the very first thing I did was to write up a treatise on all of the things that are wrong in healthcare. This was before ChatGPT could help you with it. It was something like that.

[laughter]

Emily: Bespoke.

Corey: This was a brain dump of all of the things that we need to fix. What they did was they went to a number of these healthcare associations that they work with on a regular basis, and they said, "Give us your feedback." Then they really massaged it a lot. I point out a lot that the Lorna Breen Act was really hearkening back to a day that's pre-pandemic, because when we were working on this law in the summer of 2020, even some of the country hadn't even seen their first COVID-19 patient yet, let alone for the next several years would be inundated with this.

We were trying to begin a staircase of health policy that would support health workers. The Lorna Breen Act was focused on two things. The first is creating programs, like Senator Kaine observed, that didn't exist, like they do in the military, in 45 organizations across the country. That was the biggest part of Lorna Breen Act was to get organizations moving on this. I talk about it as the national pilot group.

The second thing were to create training and retraining materials for healthcare leaders so that they understand how to change the environment where health workers are operating. As you know, as a clinician, healthcare is so geared towards the patient, the patient, the patient, it has forever, I think, just taken for granted, intentionally or unintentionally, the fact that the workforce is just always going to show up. Now they've seen they're leaving the building, if you will.

When he asked us for his advice, and we worked with Katie Wright, his health policy lead, we didn't have any expectation that we would either hear from him again or that we would be a part of this. It was only that he called back about, I'm going to say, three or four weeks later, and asked if they could talk to us about the law. They shared with us what they were going to do, and then they asked us if they could name it after Lorna. Obviously, we said yes, obviously through tears. Then we became involved in figuring out how an idea and a bill becomes law.

Then we worked with this interdisciplinary coalition of healthcare organizations, which we ended up helping to create and codify into this coalition we call ALL IN: Wellbeing First for Healthcare, and worked with their government relations teams to say, "Okay, how does this process work?" I would be remiss if I didn't point out that during the process, certain organizations like the American College of Emergency Physicians, the American Medical Association, American Hospital Association, American Nursing Association, American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, they raised their hand, and they were out front, taking the lead on this.

Then I had a chance to brief the government relations team at Johnson & Johnson. That was really interesting, because Johnson & Johnson has a credo, and it has been for ever that they look out for the health workforce, obviously summarizing this credo. Johnson & Johnson had helped us create the ALL IN coalition, ALL IN: Wellbeing First for Healthcare, along with the Harvard School of Public Health and Thrive Global and the Creative Artists Agency, and they had a very busy government relations mid-career professional. She would laugh if I called her a mid-career professional. Her name is Kelly Waters.

Kelly sat in a briefing, and she heard Lorna story. She heard the stories of the other health workers, and she just made it her job to get it done. It was those Herculean efforts that people resonated with the story, they saw what health workers needed, and they thought, "You know what? In this day and age, what more important thing can I do with my time than to help take care of those who take care of us by doing this?" I have been told by so many of the people who continue to work with us to this day as we're trying to extend the law for another five years, that this law has been the most important thing that they've worked on in their career.

It's actually been a really amazing process. Most law at the federal level can take 8 to 10 years and probably millions of dollars of lobbyists and all the rest of it. We had a volunteer group. We didn't pay a nickel for a lobbyist, and we did it in two years. We were in the Oval Office with President of the United States, watching him sign this bill. I'm looking around the Oval Office going, "I can't believe that this group came together and made this happen."

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Emily: You mentioned wanting to extend the law. Tell us about the process of getting it into law, the Oval Office moment. Then, does it expire, it needs to be renewed? Tell us about that.

Corey: This like Civics 201 now. There's that, what was it on the bill, on the bill, on the bill? That's not how it works. The way that it initially worked is, bill is introduced on the House and the Senate, and then they have committees that review subject matter committees. One of the things I've learned in this process, Emily, is that if your member of Congress is not on the subject matter committee of the issue that you're trying to advance, they can only be so helpful. Conversely, if they are on the committee, they can be very helpful.

Senator Kaine was on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, Pensions Committee, or HELP Committee, which had your restriction over part of healthcare. Senator Kaine was able to move the legislation forward through his committee process. Then on the House side, there was a congresswoman named Susan Wild, who had also been personally touched by suicide, was actually an attorney in Pennsylvania, who helped to move the legislation forward on the House side.

We were called to testify in favor of the legislation. That was a marathon. I was told it would be 15 to 20 minutes, so I drank all this water, and 4 hours into the chair, squirming. I wasn't allowed to get out or move. I had to run to the bathroom as fast as I can in the middle of someone asking me a question just because it was too uncomfortable. What was so reinforcing and inspiring is that this bill passed unanimously on the Senate side, out of the Senate HELP Committee. It passed unanimously out of the Energy and Commerce Committee on this House side, and then it passed unanimously in the Senate, and it passed by a very, very, very strong majority in the House.

That was because at that time, people were just thinking about what they could do for health workers. It also was funded by what was called the American Rescue Plan, which was present at Biden's big COVID package. It came with funds, which was very, very helpful, because as we've learned in this process, funding is usually a separate conversation. The Lorna Breen Act was initially authorized for three years, and it had $120 million worth of programmatic funding that primarily went to these 45 different organizations for that national pilot group I was talking about before.

Then it also gave funding to the CDC to develop this impact well-being guide, and that campaign that's focused on retraining healthcare leaders on how to redesign the operational environment to take care of the workforce. That Bill expired, and the funding expired, at the end of the calendar year, 2024. We went back in 2024, and we testified again, this time didn't drink as much water, and again, unanimously approved in the Energy and Commerce Committee and also approved in the Senate HELP Committee. Then it was put into a big, mega bill that was going to move forward, until Elon Musk tweeted about it three times, and then it blew the whole bill and almost everything in it out.

We are here back today, having to hit a complete reset button, because if the bill, it wasn't acted on by the end of the calendar year, everything resets. We're moving back to having to go back through the committees, having to reintroduce the bill, as well as asking for funding for the legislation. Because you can have the bill, but if the funding doesn't exist for the programs, then we're not going to be in good shape. We've done all this work through the winter and spring of 2025. We have Noah Wyle from the show The Pitt. He's helping support that legislation, doing a big hill day, and have a lot of industry support in a very challenging time, but we're not letting the challenging time dissuade us from working hard on this bill.

Emily: There's the bill, and there's also other work the foundation is doing. Tell us about some of the other work that you've done and that you are planning to do. I know one of the ones that you've done is a lot of wonderful reform in the way that licensing organizations query or ask physicians about their mental health history. That was one project that I remember you working on. Tell us about that project and other work that you've been doing through the foundation.

Corey: It's a good segue from the federal legislation, because a lot of people have asked me, "Does the federal legislation make it illegal for licensing boards to ask overly invasive questions about the prior mental health of health workers?" I've had to say, "Unfortunately, licensing is a state issue, and so we have to do that at the state level." We are doing it

at the state level, and we have done at the state level, as well as those credentialing and peer reference forms that you've undoubtedly seen, Emily, as a physician. Those have to happen at the local level.

What we did with that ALL IN coalition, and on the heels of the movie The First Wave, which is a National Geographic and Hulu produced documentary on the first wave of the pandemic, we worked on an impact campaign for that movie. That impact campaign was to get rid of these questions for health workers. We call it the ALL IN Champions Challenge for licensing and credentialing. What we've done is we've given the country three phases of work to do. One, if you are an organization that asks these questions, get those questions out, dust them off, and take a look at what they say.

Emily: For the audience, when you say those questions, explain to the audience, what are those questions?

Corey: These questions ask clinicians about their prior mental health treatment and diagnosis, which are questions that are not appropriate under the Americans with Disabilities Act. These are the questions that Lorna was so fearful of when she got mental health treatment for the one time she ever did, fearing that she would have to disclose forever and ever that she had been treated for a mental health condition, but wearing that as a scarlet letter on her shoulder. Those questions often appear in licensing applications for doctors and nurses at the state level. They absolutely appear in credentialing applications, which are the application you have to fill out for a hospital to go work at one.

Then those credentialing forms often have an addendum to them, which are these peer reference forms where your peers that you identify get asked even more invasive questions about your background. I would just say that it's completely appropriate to ask if someone is currently impaired, but it is not okay to ask if Emily's ever been to mental health therapy or been diagnosed with any mental health condition, particularly when you realize the rates of very treatable conditions, like depression and others, are as prominent in health workers as they are in the non health worker population say, "Don't we want everybody being treated for a treatable condition?" The answer yes.

These questions also often appear cohorted next to questions about moral turpitude, like, have you been convicted of things like pedophilia? That is a true question that sits next to a mental health question on a state licensing board application. This is a huge opportunity for cleanup, Emily, and that's what we've been really endeavoring to do. I would say clean

up and communication, because if we don't tell the workforce what the new rules are, we would have wasted a bunch of time.

What we've done is we've developed a three-phase toolkit for healthcare organizations and licensing boards to simply audit the questions that they're asking, change them to the best practices, which often involves-- well, it used to be an eraser. We'll just call it the delete button on your computer now. Then they submit those questions to our foundation, and then we give them national recognition for doing so through the Champions Challenge badge, and then we give them a whole communications toolkit so they can tell the workforce what the new rule set is and really celebrate it.

What I would just share with you, starting from the baseline of 17 state medical licensing boards, as I sit here today with you, there's now 35 state medical licensing boards that have changed. This is in about a two-year time span. In total, there are 50 licensing boards between medical, nursing, dental, and pharmacy that we've been able to get recognized. In addition to that, from a baseline of zero hospitals in the United States, we now have over 625 hospitals. That's about 10% of the hospitals in the United States, again in that two year time frame, who have all gone through this process. We've validated these questions, and we've given this badge out.

All told, there are 1.45 million health workers that are benefiting from this badge. That is great progress on the real main issue that Lorna had, and so many health workers have. What we've done is we've taken this Champions Challenge, and now we've expanded upon it, because now we understand that it's not just the licensing and credentialing applications. There's a bunch of other things that we need to do to support the mental health of health workers. We've created a new campaign called ALL IN for Mental Health, and it's based on this very basic principle, patients have the right to access mental healthcare and support. Health workers have the right, too. It's the same right.

We need to make sure that our health workers know that they have that right, and we need to redesign the playing field for health workers so that they can experience that same access, free from stigma, free from professional repercussions. Through this campaign on our website, ALL IN for Mental Health, what we're doing is we're giving six ways for organizations to demonstrate that they are all in for the mental health of their workforce. As no surprise, one of those six elements is this Champions Challenge we've just been talking about, which is called in the campaign equal privacy in mental health care.

That's one of our big initiatives right now, is to change this landscape, let's say culturally, as well as these barriers to mental health access, we got to get rid of all this. Health workers are human. Health workers should have the same and do have the same rights to mental health access that I do as a attorney in Virginia.

Emily: Have you taken on this work full-time? It's just a tremendous amount to have accomplished in such a short period of time. Is it you and a team, or who's pushing it forward?

Corey: We have a growing team. I stepped out of my role as a CEO of the University of Virginia Physicians Group in 2021 when I realized that this needed a full-time CEO and a full-time effort. I should say that from the very beginning, Emily, we have partnered with so many organizations, because we would not be this successful if we didn't have just been vulnerable and asked for help. We shared Lorna's story, we shared the stories of thousands of others, and we just said, "Can you help, and will you help?" We now have a total of nine people that work at the Lorna Breen Foundation.

On top of that, we have over 320 volunteer ambassadors from all over the United States. They are mostly health workers, but not exclusively. There are some survivors of suicide, some family members who've lost loved ones. There are just those who are advocates on behalf of health workers. Then we have a whole group of-- I think we have about 60 medical students now, who've all created chapters in their medical schools across Virginia, now into Michigan. We can't do this. This is not just me. This is not just Jennifer. This is me, plus a small team, a lot of whom are volunteers who are just trying to make the day-to-day experience for our healthcare workforce better.

Emily: Is there any person that you've encountered, or moment, or story, or words of advice over the last five years that stayed with you? This is such a transformative journey for you. You left your job, this is now what you're doing. What are some of those standout moments along the way?

Corey: First of all, just hearing the volume of feedback was a transformative moment. It was one that you just couldn't ignore. I have to start with that, because I think that as a healthcare leader, but as a leader in general, we often lead with our mouths, not with our ears. Leadership is easy when you close your mouth and you start with opening your ears, because you realize what the real problems are. That was an incredibly important moment for me. Like I said before, that moment lasted for three years, Emily, when we began the foundation.

I was speaking with an emergency medicine physician, who was actually in the Pacific Northwest, close by to you, and I was trying to get help, just brainstorming what to do. I'll never forget. Her name is Dr. Esther Choo, and Dr. Choo said, "Just start. You'll figure it out." Now, as I've come to learn, the emergency medicine stereotype, that's what they do, right? Got to love them. It was counter to anything that I would have been trained to do as a lawyer and as an MBA to try to plan for a while before acting. This was a moment where Esther said, "Just start and you'll figure it out." She was spot on. I don't know that I would have had the courage to just start if she hadn't just said, "Start."

The other thing that I would say is there is a gentleman who's an author, and his name is Simon Sinek. He's a leadership author. I remember he put a social media post up. This was at the beginning of the pandemic, and he basically said, "This is a time to ask others for help." I remember thinking, "You know what? I'm going to try and contact this guy if he's saying ask others for help." He was incredibly helpful at the time. We took our call, we had conversations, and he really helped inspire me.

I remember that social media posts that he put out, honestly, we would not be successful as an organization if I hadn't just been willing to put my ego aside and ask people for help. I would just maybe close this thought by saying, one of the things, Emily, that's been so incredible about this journey that we've had at the Lorna Breen Foundation is it really has given me hope for humanity looking out for each other. We were at the deepest and darkest moments of our lives. I recently gave a toast at a five-year recognition dinner we had for a group of people.

I looked at the tables. We had about 50 people in the room, and only about a quarter of the people in the room that I know before my sister-in-law died. All these other people showed up. We have had so many people say, "How can I help? How can I help? How can I help?" For me, that was just like, I didn't know we looked out for each other, like we do that in the world. I would just say to the listeners out there, if you're thinking about going and doing something, yes, you need a plan, probably more

than I had, but don't be afraid to try and figure it out. Also, don't be afraid to ask other people for help.

Emily: Well, this has been a wonderful conversation for people who want to learn more about you and the foundation and your work and everything you're doing. Where can they go to find you?

Corey: Emily, thank you so much for having me. I agree this has been-- it's been so nice to reconnect with you and have this conversation. Our website is drlornabreen.org, that's D-R-L-O-R-N-A-B-R-E-E-N dot org. That's the best place to go. Our emails and all of our contact information is on the website. I'll just put one other plug in here. I have adolescent and early 20 kids here. They still don't think that anybody will take us seriously unless we have about 1 million social media followers, and I think we got about 2,000, so encourage the audience to follow us on social too, but the best way is drlornabreen.org.

Emily: Thank you so much, Corey, for everything you've done to, of course, honor Lorna's memory, but also to fight for us, to take care of those who take care. It's really amazing

to see everything that you've done, everything that you've pushed, everything that you've accomplished, and the talented people that you've been able to amass around you to help push that mission forward. It's really inspiring, and just really glad to have you on the show. Thank you so much.

Corey: Thanks for having me, Emily. It's a pleasure to be here with you today.

[music]

Emily: This episode of The Nocturnists was produced by me, and producer and head of story development, Molly Rose-Williams. Our executive producer is Ali Block, and Ashley Pettit is our program director. Original theme music was composed by Yosef Munro, and additional music comes from Blue Dot Sessions. The Nocturnists is made possible by the California Medical Association, a physician-led organization that works to ensure the doctor-patient relationship remains at the center of medicine. To learn more about the CMA, visit cmadocs.org.

This episode of The Nocturnists conversations is sponsored by the Physicians Foundation, which supports physician well-being, practice sustainability, and leadership in delivering high-quality, cost-efficient care. The Nocturnists is also made possible by donations from listeners like you. In fact, we recently moved over to Substack, which makes it easier than ever to support our work directly. By joining us with a donation of $2, $5, or $10 a month, you'll become an essential part of our creative community. I'm your host, Emily Silverman. See you next week.