“I can’t fight you anymore.
It’s you I’m fighting for.”
-Ordinary Love by U2
I’m exhausted. As the pandemic rages on, the mental toll of dealing with COVID-19 has started to wear on me. As a practicing hospitalist in the Midwest impacted by one of the many hotspots caused by the meatpacking industry, I have spent a fair bit of time with this virus on the frontline. Some aspects of practicing medicine in …
COVID-19 is a war on two fronts
Game of Thrones has become a focus of American pop culture over the last eight years. Even now, almost a year after the finale aired, people are still discussing the impact of the show and the controversial last season. Many of us were hoping to finally get answers to questions we have been asking since the beginning, and the final season provided us with some answers, although not necessarily satisfying …
Game of Thrones from a urological perspective
Smithfield Foods, the nation’s largest pork producer, closed its Sioux Falls, SD, slaughterhouse after many Smithfield employees grew sick. Tyson Foods closed its Columbus Junction, IA pork slaughterhouse in April, according to the Wall Street Journal.
While many U.S. slaughterhouses are closing, pork slaughterhouses and pork producers are bracing for another coronavirus challenge: a virus called Severe Acute Diarrhea …
Is a new coronavirus already here?
Drinking the Kool-Aid
Across the USA recently, demonstrators wielding, “Stop the madness! It is just a cold virus!” and “Let me work” signs, chanting “Freedom now” and “Fire Fauci,” dangerously demanded an end to social distancing and stay-at-home orders.
In Italy, we would assume such demonstrations were fomented by the Mafia. In America, the provocateurs are right-wing extremists, Read more…
Don’t drink the COVID conspiracy Kool-Aid
“Would an STI cause abdominal pain?” someone in a class discussion asked.
“Well, when I had chlamydia, I didn’t have abdominal pain,” I responded truthfully.
Instantly, the group went silent.
“OK, Jay. That’s … TMI,” someone else in the group quickly retorted with an uncomfortable half-smile.
I shuddered.
Immediately, I felt pressured to usher in some sort of anodyne remark to help dissipate the uneasy cloud that I could feel billowing out around us.
“Haha, I’m …
Life may never be the same after COVID-19. With tens of thousands of Americans having succumbed to the coronavirus in the United States, some of us are considering our own mortality. Life insurance companies have plenty of new customers. Estate planning attorneys are busier than ever. Many of us are thinking about how our loved ones will be taken care of in the event of our own death.
Death is always …
We need to learn to accept death in the United States
My three-year-old daughter calls it “canolavirus.” To her, it represents the answer to a number of hitherto unprecedented events happening in her life at this time. Her physician mommy working from home for a number of weeks now. The last she remembers mommy being home continuously for such a long stretch of time was never. I went back to work after my maternity leave when my daughter was …
The unexpected time the COVID-19 pandemic gives physicians
One of the great responsibilities in doctoring is alleviating suffering. That hasn’t changed. But the novelty of COVID-19 makes us uncertain as we care for our patients. Anxious even. We feel helpless watching people get ravaged with SARS-CoV-2. We are all limited in our fund of knowledge. We know that we aren’t incompetent, but COVID-19 has made us feel impotent.
A hospitalist friend recently broke down in tears after pronouncing …
Humility drives physicians in the face of COVID-19
If you’re like me and you don’t live in a state that has already started re-opening, you are likely taking a lot of walks. Regardless of where you are in the U.S., I think we can all agree that if you cough or sneeze in any public setting, you automatically feel like you may as well have a scarlet “S” hung around your neck. I have found myself looking around …
We are not past the risk of COVID-19
She reached for my hand, her hands gnarled, the skin fragile, translucent, road mapped by bluish veins: Hands that had done much in her 87 years. She looked at me from her hospital bed and with voice trembling, her eyes tearing, spoke words that penetrated my heart: “Can I stay here? Everyone is so kind. I am all alone now. I have no family or friends left. I have no …
Loneliness is a silent epidemic crying out to be heard
I am a 41-year old physician in the Phoenix metropolitan area. In the course of several unforgettable weeks in March 2020, my life, like every American’s, had been drastically flipped on its head. While I feel fortunate to be able to continue to have employment and a source of income, I cannot deny there is a daily palpable sense that my profession puts me at a great risk for exposure …
Finding hope in the COVID-19 pandemic
The last couple of months in a world with COVID-19 have felt absurd, incomprehensible, like something out of a movie. Most of us hunker down in our homes and wear masks whenever we’re out. Those who work in patient care settings try to limit risk, both of becoming infected, or perhaps worse, unknowingly infecting others. How can this really be happening? Everything seems to have changed overnight. The paranoia, fear, …
Alfred Hitchcock, COVID-19, and the MacGuffin
Like other physicians, the past few months have left me with a multitude of feelings; helplessness, fear, anger, and uncertainty among them.
As an oncologist, I’ll confess, there’s another emotion I’ve been grappling with…frustration. As of mid-May, there will be close to 80,000 deaths from COVID-19 in the U.S. During this same time, there have been over 160,000 people who died from cancer.
I’m not trying to diminish COVID at all. COVID …
It doesn’t matter whether it’s COVID or cancer: We need to unite all to cure the one
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As a first-year internal medicine resident in NYC, the physical and emotional toll this has placed on me is unmeasurable. My attending physician reminds me of someone commanding a battlefield: my “allied” residents, doctors that chose different specialties but are now deployed to my floor, “coalition” doctors, students that graduated early to help us. Medicine has been replaced by …
How coronavirus took my grandfather’s life
It’s hard to imagine that someone could die from diarrhea. If you live in America today, you’ve likely never heard of anyone with cholera, and certainly never of anyone dying from diarrhea. Yet, in the middle of the nineteenth century, it was fairly commonplace. Medicine just wasn’t advanced at the time. Amputating limbs of fully-conscious human beings was only recently falling out of favor with the discovery of ether as …
What John Snow and cholera tell us about the COVID pandemic
As the pandemic loomed, there was widespread concern about running out of crucial medical resources, such as mechanical ventilators. We watched as the crisis escalated in Italy and elsewhere, where hospitals seemed overwhelmed.
We prepared for the surge. Hospitals, industry, and government clamored to secure both ventilators and other valuable resources such as personal protective equipment and medications. Health care professionals were recruited to New York City and other hard-hit areas. …
Medical care is being rationed, but not in the way you think
Troubled by the volume of patients dying before they could even be taken out of ambulances, a New York emergency physician recently ended her own life.
Are we all just vital statistics, waiting to be calculated? COVID-19 has infected and killed more than 56,000 Americans. We must remember that every single one of these deaths is a loved one—a son or daughter, a father or mother, a husband or wife, a …
Enduring the pandemic: How to support your friend on the frontlines
I feel like I am reliving a bad dream. The race to find a treatment and/or cure to SARS-CoV-2 is reminiscent of decades of practicing gastroenterology while hepatitis C roamed the hospital wards as a death sentence for many. I found myself recently recalling a patient whose story ends with science finding a cure.
As I peered around the ICU curtain, I could see a motionless ill man. I …
My professional life battling an RNA virus
I was seven years old when I first got my heart broken. I was swiftly rebuffed by my second-grade crush, Brett who, upon getting gently pecked on the cheek by me one afternoon following recess, grimaced and began aggressively wiping off the invisible remnants of the kiss with the palms of both his hands, swiping vigorously up and down his cheek while shouting in utter disgust, “ew!” in front of …
As I stand in line at a Tampa Lowe’s today in the middle of a global pandemic, I cannot help but note the vast differences in people’s behavior around me. There is a complete dichotomy in the ways in which individuals are responding to COVID-19. Some customers who err on the side of safety are sitting in their cars waiting for curbside pickup. Others are carefully social distancing as they …
Comparing the preparedness of hurricanes to pandemics
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