Dr. Jon McCullers fired up the Zoom call the way he did so many times, back when the COVID-19 pandemic was tearing through Memphis and the Mid-South.

McCullers’s formal titles were pediatrician-in-chief at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital and chief operating officer of clinical affairs at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center’s College of Medicine. But that didn’t begin to describe the unprecedented challenges he faced.

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He was one of the leaders of the area’s COVID-19 task force, which set the region’s policy for blunting the pandemic. He was one of the leaders of the back-to-business subcommittee, which established the rules by which local businesses could operate. And he had been entrusted by the governor with the task of reopening the entire University of Tennessee system.

It was an almost impossible sets of jobs. It required McCullers to balance public health and economic survival. And it required him to be on multiple Zoom calls every day.

So on this day in the fall of 2020, McCullers fired up Zoom once again. It was a good thing the camera on his laptop captured him only from the shoulders up.

“I had a big catheter through my abdominal wall,” he said. “I had this whole apparatus but nobody could see it because it was under the Zoom. Nobody knew that morning I had surgery for prostate cancer.”