Manny Alvarez is a 23-year-old college student with the misfortune of having not just a devastating cancer — but the wrong devastating cancer. The chemotherapeutic agents shown to be highly active against his specific tumor cells are FDA approved for the treatment of leukemia, but not for the stunningly rare kind of sarcoma with which Manny has been diagnosed. Nothing is …
The scalpel hits the skin immediately, splaying it open with one smooth swipe. Two more swipes through yellow globular fat and I hit the glistening white fascia layer. If this weren’t an emergency, I would stop to carefully cauterize the small bleeding blood vessels in the fat layer, but there is no time for that now. I nick the middle of …
I never really watched medical shows, even before and during medical school. I watched maybe one season of ER, a couple of seasons of Grey’s Anatomy and House MD and maybe one episode each of Private Practice, Chicago Hope, Emily Owens MD and other random medical shows. The only medical show I made an exception for was Scrubs, because it was …
Patient-doctor communication often has many facets, wrinkles, and twists. Medical school prepares a doctor minimally for the ups and downs of these patient interactions. There is no mannequin who can train each medical student how to deal with every personality, response, or even outburst by each patient. On the job training is sine qua non.
During and after medical school, it took …
When my sister, Jessica, was a nurse anesthetist student at the University of New England, she had the opportunity to rotate at Johns Hopkins, and she seized it. She was young and fairly new to the medical world and so she did not recognize at first the name of the neurosurgeon with whom she would be working — Dr. Ben Carson. After receiving multiple comments from numerous people about how great it …
My patient had suffered a terrible, crushing injury to his chest leaving many ribs and his sternum fractured, his lungs and heart badly bruised and his body on the edge between life and death. He was on a ventilator, the tube through his mouth into his windpipe pushed air into lungs that couldn’t draw for themselves. He was on constant medications for pain and to sedate him while we used …
Do you remember Mad Libs from when you were a child? A story is filled with blanks, and as you fill them in with inappropriate and ridiculous words, you laugh until you can’t see straight. You laugh until you can’t breathe, and your parents beg you to stop! Let’s be children again. Share these with the nurses, and give the shift a little levity.
Pain medication. You see, doctor, my pain specialist …
I’m a physician, and I’m adrift. I am pretty much lost at sea. I’ve often thought of writing this column, but afraid I’d be recognized, I’ve hesitated for years. Even now, I’ll most likely remain anonymous, because I’m in a vulnerable position. Let me preface my remarks with the reassurance that I’m not a bad person.
I developed dependence on opioids several …
I recently read an article written by a human physician about her personal feelings and other people’s reactions to her decision to quit practicing medicine.
The author frames the article around how her choice was made after she recognized how detrimental her career was to her own health. The irony of a doctor abandoning her profession because it was causing …
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