Drew Kosmowski
My name is Drew and I consider Jon to be a friend, colleague, and Brother in Arms though we have lost touch over the past many years. Jon and I were members of the understaffed EM Residency class of 1991 at Madigan AMC. While I did not serve in combat with Jon, I could say that our 3 years of EM Residency training and 2 years after were the moral equivalent due to incredible stress, long hours, sleep deprivation, family separation, and even physical demands of running from patient to patient without even time to pee for 10 hour shifts. We both PCS’d to Ft Bragg where we were understaffed again, without Residents to help the workload and up to 22 shifts per month while preparing to pass our written and oral EM Boards. Grueling. EM Docs and staff know the concept of “black cloud” whereby some Docs seem to attract more and sicker patients than most. Jon was a Black cloud throughout the 5 years i worked with him. But even then, as now, I’ve recognized that this had made him a far better EM Doc than many because he handled it and kept driving on despite the chaos. He maintained his wit and humor in the face of this and never lost composure. His wit was somewhere between one liners and “Dad jokes” and for this I greatly admired him. He occasionally said, “this is an A and B conversation, please C your way out of it.” He would always bust his … to save his patients’.
The Army, medicine, and life moved us in many directions since then and we lost touch. I’ve searched him a couple times over the years and saw he was replacing windows in his historic home and then this morning I learned of his illness and passing.
I miss you, my friend. We were Brothers in Arms against the toils of military EM medicine, Ratt Mice, and the struggle to maintain sanity when all about you is chaos. Peace.
Drew Kosmowski, MD, FACEP
COL, USA(ret)