Dr. Laurent Duvernay-Tardif goes from Chiefs’ line to front line of pandemic battle
Through seven years in his astounding simultaneous pursuit of careers in the NFL and medicine, Chiefs offensive lineman Laurent Duvernay-Tardif will tell you he has become adept at transitioning.
Somehow, it became second nature to switch from a football uniform on a field in front of 80,000 people while helping protect teammates to … an offseason of donning scrubs and studying in solitude while learning to help safeguard humanity.
But he never had encountered anything like the blunt transformation he faced on March 12 when he returned from a two-week sailing trip to the Caribbean with his girlfriend, Florence.
“Boom, in the blink of an eye … half the planet was on lockdown,” he said in a phone interview with The Star on Thursday.
When they left on Feb. 28, he had set out to recharge and decompress and process all that had happened in the previous few months as the Chiefs won the organization’s first Super Bowl in 50 years and his unique story was celebrated all over — especially in his native Montreal.
When they left, the COVID-19 coronavirus still was being treated more like a murmur than an impending disaster … though he was conscious of it even days before the Super Bowl: “I think it’s serious,” he said when asked about it then.
Suddenly, as they followed the story’s development intermittently at sea, it became a different tier of seriousness.
Serious enough to make them cut the trip short. Serious enough that they were required to go into isolation for two weeks like every Canadian who had been out of the country.
And serious enough that he soon knew he had to help any way he could, perhaps at once reflecting both a medical oath to serve and the ethos of the offensive lineman.
So he reached out to Canadian health officials and the Faculty of Medicine at his alma mater, McGill University.
Initially, he was limited to promoting new health measures since despite earning his medical degree he has not yet started residency training.
A few weeks ago, though, the landscape shifted because of increased illnesses in general and health-care workers becoming sick and many other other reasons for heavier personnel demands.
So the health ministry actively recruited professionals and students in medicine and nursing and in the process rallied retired health-care workers of every sort.
And with that, Duvernay-Tardif transitioned from the front line of the Chiefs to the front line of battling the pandemic at what he calls a long-term facility near his hometown about an hour from Montreal.
His actual title now is orderly, because that was the easiest way to promptly get him engaged with a largely senior population that hadn’t been a particular focal point of his studies. And his role, he said, largely includes tasks more traditionally performed by orderlies or nurses than doctors. Like the other day, when he was learning how to crush pills the right way for safest consumption.
Whatever he can do, he is honored by this chance and wants it known he is privileged to be healthy and able to offer anything. While he does hope his profile might inspire others to help, too, he also wants it understood he is merely one of a legion of people heeding the urgent call.
“I don’t want to look like a superhero or whatever,” he said. “I’m just doing my duty.”
Just the same, his is a singular tale of a double life — one he says is not being just tolerated by the Chiefs but heartily endorsed. When he called to see if this defied language in his football contract, he said the Chiefs were “amazing. And of course they understand what’s going on and if there’s a need they want to be part of the solution the same way I want to.”
For a few fascinating reasons, no one in the organization likely is more enthusiastic about what Duvernay-Tardif is doing than coach Andy Reid.
For one thing, Reid’s mother, Elizabeth, was a radiologist who went to the same school as the player nicknamed “LDT.” For another, along the way, Reid was introduced to a medical colleague of hers named Danny Fortmann, a Pro Football Hall of Famer who went on to become team physician for the Los Angeles Rams.
When Fortmann was drafted out of Colgate by the Chicago Bears in 1936, he was conflicted over whether to play pro football or go to medical school. The legendary George “Papa Bear” Halas supported him in aspiring to both, scheduling issues and all.
Reid came to have a bond with Fortmann, and that story remained etched in his mind when the Chiefs drafted LDT in 2014.
“It allowed me to kind of with a clear mind go, ‘Hey, listen, do what you need to do here,’” Reid said in a Zoom call Friday morning.
What LDT has done since, Reid said, was a “pretty spectacular thing and a tough thing.” Especially considering the rarity of Canadians making it in the NFL at all and English being Duvernay-Tardif’s second language.
And now … this.
“He’s all-in being a doctor, and being the best doctor he possibly can be,” Reid said. “Doctors are helpers, they’re caretakers. So he’s going to jump in and take care of people, just like he does as a player.”
There are risks involved, everyone knows, and Duvernay-Tardif concedes that. But he also stresses he’s taking strenuous precautions, from personal protective equipment he dons to the process he goes through on his way home.
As he spoke Thursday, Duvernay-Tardif was on his way from the facility to a second apartment he owns and is currently unable to lease. So it serves as his transitional zone, where he changes clothes and showers and washes his medical gear in special soap before driving home.
“Right now, my girlfriend and I are OK with that solution,” he said. “But I feel like it’s something that’s really fluid and could evolve.”
Similarly, where he’s working has few current coronavirus cases. But the elderly are so fragile and the virus spread so volatile, he noted, that an outbreak there could be catastrophic.
When he thinks about that and the endless days and emotional toll on so many peers he feels privileged to stand among, he feels compelled to reiterate a public-service point about practicing safe measures and staying home as much as possible.
“Yes, it is an individual sacrifice. But once you look at what everybody’s doing, working with their visor, mask, gown and just like exhausting days trying to save lives, I think the least you can do as a citizen is to stay home when the government is telling you to stay home,” he said. “Anyway, I know it’s kind of a political deal a little more in (the U.S.) than it is here right now. But it made me realize that as a citizen, when I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is hard’ … what was I thinking compared to the sacrifices (health-care workers) are making?
“Anyway, food for thought.”
So is this: As a member of the NFL players’ union’s coronavirus task force, LDT said he defers to the wisdom of epidemiologists and notes he is there to “learn and maybe give a little of my perspective.”
Part of that perspective is that the NFL not only has the responsibility of making sure its players are safe but also an obligation to communities and fans to make sure the resumption of games doesn’t become “a vector of propagation for that virus.”
While he’s doing this three days a week for the foreseeable future, though, he’s still for the most part fully participating in the Chiefs’ virtual offseason training campaign. The makeshift “little gym” he’s created in his garage makes for a nice diversion from the hospital right now.
When the time comes, his work with the Chiefs will be his primary focus again … with the transition perhaps more welcome than ever.
Maybe, by then, the NFL will wise up and allow him to have “DR.” on the back of his jersey.
“I’m not getting into that,” he said, laughing.
This isn’t about him, after all.
It’s about being a member of another team, the one fixated on stopping this menace and helping any way it can along the way.
Clad in a lab coat as he finished that Zoom interview Friday from the care facilitywhere he works, he turned his phone to show a waiting tray of food.
As ever, it was on to the next.
“I’m going to crush that,” he said, smiling, “and go back to work.”