I first met Wes Ely in 2016, when I wrote about ICU delirium and Ely’s attempts, as a critical-care physician at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, to urge fellow health care workers to rethink the use of heavy sedation in ICUs. His research was an attempt to limit the crippling cognitive and physical impairments he saw develop in many critical-care patients long after they left the hospital, something he came to call post intensive care syndrome, or PICS.

Well, a lot’s happened since 2016. I thought of Ely’s work often as ICU care became a mainstay of the Covid-19 pandemic and wondered about the long-term prognosis of people who were so sickened by the virus they’d been heavily sedated and placed on ventilators to survive. Then long Covid showed up, and became something Ely grappled with as well.

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