“I was on the night we got the confirmation a person had died,” Ryan Padgett said. “The first case. We had a little huddle amongst the ER doctors. We knew the world was going to change.”
Padgett, 45, became a doctor because of sports. As a teenager, he tore his rotator cuff pitching and injured both knees playing football. At Northwestern, he watched in awe as team physician Howard Sweeney performed a knee replacement.