It’s another day for me as an intern on the labor-and-delivery floor of my large urban hospital — another day scrambling to help pregnant women deliver and trying to keep pace with the unpredictable timetable of the birthing process.
My hospital phone rings. I’m really starting to dread that sound.
It’s the triage nurse. We’re admitting a patient: Mrs. Harris, age thirty-four, who’s had several prior deliveries and therefore carries the label …
Recently, I watched the movie Iron Jawed Angels with my daughter for her high school literature class. It retells the story of the women’s suffrage movement in the early 1900s, highlighting what the suffragettes endured to fight for women’s right to vote. Many brave women were taunted and tortured, arrested while peacefully protesting and then brutally beaten in prison, and, for some, ostracized from their community, family, and friends. Incredibly, …
What are the most important things we can teach our kids? These days there are a lot of possible answers. Obviously, STEM skills (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) often lead to lucrative, stable careers; they seem to be tickets to “the good life,” or so we’re taught. Languages are helpful. You can’t go wrong with basic computer programming skills.
But in a world where people seem increasingly unkind, dishonest, greedy, violent and …
When doing scientific research, we expect to fail. In fact, we write the likelihood of negative findings into our protocols and plans. We expect things to not always work as we think they might, and we accept that we may not prove what we set out to prove.
In the scientific community, we depend on complete transparency when we fail. We depend on it to advance science, to help people, and …
This discussion is something I’ve tossed around in my head for awhile. As I have gone back and forth on the topic, I decided to debate myself while I answer the question:
Is work-life balance a real thing? If so, what is it and can it be achieved, specifically in a demanding field such as medicine that often expects your job to be your life?
At first, it may seem strange that “physician” and “side gig” are even used in the same sentence. After all, the average physician in the United States is already working more than a 40 hour work week and struggling with issues related to work-life balance. As someone who talks about physician burnout and as the founder of the Physician Side Gigs Facebook group, I’ve been asked many times how adding …
There are a lot of TV commercials for structured settlement companies these days. You know, the companies that say if you are cash-strapped but have a structured settlement they will be happy to buy your settlement and give you “cash now.” Some of the commercials are quite clever and catchy featuring everything from operettas to boy bands. After seeing so many of these, one has to conclude that there has …
My car has one hundred seventeen thousand miles on it after just three and a half years. It has taken me back and forth from here to Atlanta more times than I can remember, to the beach, to the mountains I love to hike, and across the country in a seven thousand mile trip four falls ago. It runs well, just like new as a matter of fact. I have …
Communication is the cornerstone of good health care. Despite all the external challenges we face with the system in which we work, those few minutes we spend with patients and their families are precious — and are what we will be remembered for. We, therefore, owe it to our patients to be at our very best and to make them the absolute center of …
In my off time, as a mom and a physician, I spend a decent amount of time lurking in a rather strange environment, even for the internet. A place so filled with anxiety, stories of ill-chosen spouses and little glimpses of unbridled joy, that you’d think you were somehow inside a taping of the Real Housewives of This-crying-baby-makes-me-hope-that-I-end-up-having-a-dissociative-fugue. You know, *that* place.
Have you bought a new memory foam mattress recently? Many come vacuumed in shrink bags. Once air gets in the bag, the mattress expands to its normal size. It is fascinating to watch how they expand.
It is not so fascinating to watch a patient expand to their actual size, when they are forcefully squeezed into an enclosed time space like an office …
Eight weeks after I delivered my third child, I was diagnosed with a four-centimeter lung mass. Yes, you heard that right. For those in medicine, this is terrifying to hear as the first thing that comes to mind is lung cancer. Lung cancer is notoriously hard to treat, typically fatal with a short life expectancy after diagnosis and extremely unfair to a lifelong nonsmoker who has spent 12 years in …
Ben diverts his eyes and wipes away tears, his typical stoicism and iron-willed suppression of emotion giving way to a sea of churning thoughts, feelings and memories. While visiting as his hospice social worker, we’d been talking about his impending death, walking it through in our minds from the time the funeral home arrived until he’s planted in the ground. We’d talked about death before, and he’d always been cool …
In the emergency room, the stress is palpable. The hairs on your neck rise up as you enter the resuscitation bay where the next unconscious patient has just arrived. You can almost feel death as it circulates through the air, like a vulture in the sky. The air tastes sterile, and you hear the crash cart and ultrasound being rolled over to the patient’s bed.
Pchum Ben is a national religious festival in Cambodia. It’s a time when families pay their respects to their dearly departed — those relatives that walked the earth before us, those who lived, laughed, cried and prayed in an era when we were not necessarily present.
The ceremony involves the offering of food from the living to the dead, as the ghosts of bygone relatives temporarily waken from their perceived existence …
I remember medical school and residency vividly. How could anyone forget such a sacrifice, such a vital investment in a top-notch education? Hours upon hours of hard work while practical knowledge amassed exponentially every single week. As a lifelong learner committed to excellence, I loved being surrounded by equally dedicated, intelligent high achievers. My classmates in med school and residency were at the top of their class, and we helped …
Even though we have probably 20 years of work remaining as physicians, like a lot of you, I like to think about how we will spend our retirement years. After all, in twenty years we will still only be in our early fifties, hopefully with no dependents and a lot of financial security. Of course, my wife and I are interested in traveling, spending time with grandchildren (hopefully), gardening and …
I just got off the phone with Paul, a highly-sought-after plastic surgeon in New York.
“I don’t want to be a doctor anymore,” Paul says. “What else can I do? I have lots of restaurant experience. I’ve worked in 15 restaurants during my life. It’s not easy, but I could do it. I did research on chains and franchises, and I chose Chick-fil-A. …
“This is a 17-year-old boy who came in as a category 1 trauma yesterday for a rollover MVC with bilateral uncal herniation, epidural hematoma and subdural hematoma currently intubated and sedated with propofol and fentanyl.”
As the overnight resident presented this patient on PICU, we could see everyone’s early morning smiles fading slowly and beginning to understand the grave consequences anticipated in this severe traumatic brain injury. We could see the …
