COVID-19

Dr. Lorna M. Breen was born and raised in Danville

‘Died a hero’

Dr. Lorna M. Breen, 49, a New York emergency room physician who recovered from the coronavirus and then took her own life earlier this week, was born and grew up in Danville, the the daughter of Drs. Phillip and Rosemary Breen.

The Breens still have local ties and many local friends, and they are remembered at Danville School District, Danville's First Baptist Church and Wyoming Seminary. Lorna went to Cornell University for her undergraduate years then later pursued her medical degree in Virginia and worked as an emergency medical technician.

Dr. Phillip C. Breen, a retired trauma surgeon who practiced at Geisinger Medical Center in Danville for many years, talked about his daughter during an interview with Chris Cuomo on CNN Tuesday night.

"She just ran out of steam," he said.

She was not struggling with any emotional difficulties or problems with stress prior to being on the front lines of battling a pandemic, her father said.

Dr. Breen said his daughter, who was the medical director of the emergency department at New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital, "died a hero."

"She was a doctor, every bit of the word that a doctor should be," Breen said. "She put her life on the line to take care of other people. She was in the trenches, so to speak, right in the front line as people were dying left and right around her."

He said his daughter contracted the virus and stayed home for just over a week, which in hindsight, he feels wasn't enough time.

"I think she felt an overwhelming sense of wanting to help her colleagues and her friends who were still fighting the good fight, and so she strapped on her harness and took the bit in her mouth and she went back," Breen said. "I talked to her just before her final 12-hour shift. And during the time she was on that shift, she basically went down in the traces like a horse that had pulled too heavy a load and couldn't go a step further and just went down."

Breen said his daughter was hospitalized until she was determined to be well enough to be out on her own, but she was "clearly not better."

"She took her own life because I think she was tired and she was the kind of person, as somebody has very aptly put it, she was like the fireman who runs into the burning building to save another life and doesn't regard anything about herself. So she has paid the price and she's been in the trenches," Breen said.

Lorna was admitted to the hospital at the University of Virginia for exhaustion, her father said, adding that her mother is a doctor in the ward where she was treated.

After about a week, she left the hospital to stay with her mom, her father said. Then, last weekend, she went to stay with her sister in Charlottesville, Va., and that is where she died, her father said.