Ryan McNamara MD

Author

Ryan McNamara attended medical school at the University of Alabama in Birmingham and did his residency in Internal Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. He has practiced hospital-based acute care medicine in Tennessee since completing training in 2001. He is married with three children.
As a hospitalist, Dr. McNamara has cared for the entire spectrum of humanity: from the homeless drug addicts to the parents of U.S. Congressmen; from penniless immigrants to celebrities; from young adults to the demented elderly. Acute illness strikes us all. His practice has ranged from the emergency room to the ICU, to the rehab center. Mostly, Dr. McNamara practices upon the general medicine ward, diagnosing and treating medical problems severe enough to get one hospitalized, but not severe as to require life support: diseases of the heart, lungs, or kidneys; of the blood, gut, or brain. Every day, he balances the medical needs of his patients with their psychological ones; the science with the art.
In 2020, Dr. McNamara’s job changed suddenly and completely, as it did for so many other hospitalists and hospital workers. Going to work before then meant a wide variety of diagnoses and a wide range of solutions would present themselves each day. In all of them, Dr. McNamara would be walking in the footsteps of the giants who tread before him. Every disease had been seen before; every problem could be matched with a coherent plan. And if he didn’t know the disease, or how to execute that plan, there would always be a “specialist” who would.
COVID-19 changed all of that. For the first several months of the pandemic, Dr. McNamara was the specialist. Doctors weren’t certain how transmissible the coronavirus was, how long it would incubate, or under what circumstances it would be contagious. Nor did they have any idea how to treat it. His hospital needed two physicians to serve full time in the locked-down COVID unit. Dr. McNamara was one of them.
The first wave of COVID-19 was a light one in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Community lockdowns had occurred before the virus had become locally widespread. The second wave, in the summer of 2020 was another matter. It not only struck thousands of people and hospitalized hundreds, Dr. McNamara’s own group practice suffered an epidemic of its own. Two of his fellow hospitalists became seriously ill. 12 hour shifts became 36 hour shifts.
The dynamic of quarantine had changed. COVID-19 was no longer a theoretical threat, but an existential one. While restaurants and gyms reopened, and local schools planned their in-person autumn term, front-line providers had to watch their breath. They were high risk of becoming infected themselves, and spreading it to others. Large men in particular were more likely to be “superspreaders”. Quarantine ended for most Chattanoogans in May, 2020. For Dr. McNamara, it had just begun.
He needed something else to occupy the long lonely hours when he wasn’t at work. He found the perfect hobby. Gravity Drive was published in October, 2021.