- A doctor says she was uninvited from a friend’s wedding for working during COVID-19.
- Emily Long said on TikTok that she was due to fly to Texas after a 28-hour shift but was uninvited.
- Long said she spent “thousands of dollars” on the event and booked vacation time to attend.
A doctor says she was uninvited from a best friend’s wedding, just days before she was due to attend, for being a healthcare worker during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dr. Emily Long, who describes herself as a plastic-surgery resident in Boston on her TikTok profile, told her followers on Friday that she has spent “thousands of dollars” on the celebrations for her friend and used “limited vacation time” to fly to Texas for the wedding.
Long, who has more than 170,000 followers at the time of writing, usually uses TikTok to post informative videos about her surgery residency and intensive-care unit rotation, including “day in the life” videos and career advice.
In the video, which has over 5.2 million views, Long asked her followers to name a time when they had been uninvited from an event because of their job in healthcare during the pandemic.
Long said she was flying out after a 28-hour shift and messaged her friend to reassure her that she was taking COVID-19 precautions.
“When I texted her this morning to let her know that I was being tested and taking all these precautions before I flew in an attempt to make her feel comfortable, she totally freaked out when she found out that I take care of sick people,” Long said in the video.
“Who would have thought that a doctor takes care of sick people? I don’t know,” she added.
Long then said she was uninvited because she made her friend and other people “uncomfortable,” before adding that her plane ticket to Texas was nonrefundable.
In a follow-up video posted two days later, Long thanked her followers for inviting her to visit them in Texas instead. She said she did not fly to Texas in the end and exchanged her ticket for flight credits, opting instead to work now that she no longer needed the vacation time.
“I am working because I have a commitment to my job and to my patients and to my program to, you know, really be a professional,” she said.
She added that requesting the time off was “a huge ask for me to be able to go to this event, and it was going to cost $2,800 for someone to cover my shift.”
Long did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.