Elise loves this book. The protagonist is a girl who, due to a desire to fit in with her friends, denies her love of lima beans. Camilla awakens with stripes on her skin, and no one can explain it. The doctors are called in, then the specialists. The scientists and experts come next, but all are stumped. …
COVID: an impending case of the stripes
Like many physicians not initially on the front line of the COVID-19 pandemic, I watched with growing dread as stories from doctors and nurses started coming out from hot spots first in China then in Italy and then Seattle and New York. Seeing their faces and hearing their voices, I was struck by their exhaustion and fear but also by their sense of responsibility and duty. I wanted to help, …
Bearing witness: the physician’s role in a time of crisis
“I early conceived a liking for, and sought every opportunity to be in, a position to relieve the suffering of others.”
— Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler
In a time of crisis, epidemic or pandemic, “Who ya gonna call?”: An athlete? A booty-shaking singer? Television or movie stars? Yes, entertainers’ work provide humans fun. They make us laugh, or can foster team pride. But are they heroes? Do they save lives?
Might you call …
Physicians are called to care and service, pandemic or not
We worked tirelessly attempting to resuscitate this mother of five for almost an hour. Her husband was called, and he notified us that he would be there shortly. In the end, our heroic measures were simply not enough. It is fearful to imagine being told your wife and mother to your five children is no longer alive on Mother’s Day. The uncertainty of what killed her is a tough pill …
A young doctor struggles against the emotional devastation of losing a patient
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
What labor struggles do a grocery worker, custodian, and doctor in the United States have in common? A few months ago, many people’s answers may have been – not much. But ever since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, our shared challenges are becoming ever more apparent.
The pandemic is revealing that physicians, under our current for-profit medical system, are workers. Doctors are being expected to labor in dangerous settings for …
How the COVID-19 pandemic highlights the need for class consciousness among physicians
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
This concept comes up in Glennon Doyle’s new #1 best-selling book, Untamed. In this memoir, she looks at her unhappy marriage through the eyes of her daughter. She has been staying in the marriage for her children, believing that getting a divorce would be bad for her kids. As she is combing her daughter’s hair, she has an epiphany: I am staying in this marriage for my little girl. But …
Are physicians martyrs or models?
I became interested in medicine in my second year of college at Baylor University. I lived in the old Brooks Hall, which was built with large suites and communal bathrooms, and formerly used as military housing. Six of my suite-mates were pre-med and had doctors for either fathers or mothers. They all spoke of the work their respective parents did, and how much enjoyment treating patients brought them, and that …
Kudos to the new breed of physicians
It’s been said that history doesn’t repeat, but it does often rhyme. And as we’re learning during COVID-19, lessons from the past can be a guide to help us navigate a modern pandemic — if we listen to the rhythm of history.
For a little more than two years in the middle of the 19th century, Great Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire, and Sardinia fought the Russian Empire for …
Everyone agrees nurses are heroes. Why aren’t we treating them that way?
If you ask a group of medical students to raise their hands if they are, in fact, racist, I’d venture to guess that not a single hand would shoot up. And I don’t think they would be lying. I am sure that no student believes that he, she, or they are a bigot.
Many of us have committed our lives to care for patients regardless of race, gender, or socioeconomic status. …
Deploring racism isn’t enough: Addressing white privilege in medical school
Art is a way to find yourself and lose yourself at the same time. When troubled, we experience the monkey mind, thinking of worst outcomes, or replaying past events. A creative pursuit helps stall that process by helping us actively practice mindfulness. There is no wrong brush stroke in art; you simply incorporate that into the painting and create something beautiful out of it. A good philosophy for life too, …
Incorporate art therapy into healing spaces
The one thing about the coronavirus I keep coming back to is how much SketchyMicro let me down.
Out of all the mnemonic cartoons SketchyMicro has produced, their entry for coronavirus is among the most simple: a kingly figure is blowing his nose into tissue paper beneath a blazing sun, his towering castle perched atop a hill in the distance. His regalia include a golden crown (to remind us of corona) …
A medical student asks: Are we just cartoon heroes?
An excerpt from A Leader’s Guide to Giving a Memorable Speech: How to Deliver a Message and Captivate an Audience.
“The most powerful words in English are ‘tell me a story.'”
—Pat Conroy, author of The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini
“Over the years I have become convinced that we …
People remember stories in your speech. The rest fades away.
An excerpt from Nurses are Nuts.
The pharmacy department plays a vital role in hospitals. They prepare and dispense medications. Sometimes the pharmacist will receive an order from the doctor on a med whose written dosage he is not sure of. In some cases, the pharmacist will …
Nurses do not get paid extra for being pharmacists
I spent many weeks as a patient in the hospital a few years ago and was encephalopathic during the entire stay. This means that I could speak and interact and, at times, especially to those who did not know me, appeared normal. I was told that I would give coherent lectures to the medical students who came to see me on rounds, only to not remember doing so an hour …
Not visiting your loved one in the hospital is an act of love
I never expected to find myself in this position. Ironically, I, a family medicine physician, in a world grappling with a pandemic, became underemployed for the first time since high school. A unique set of circumstances led me to this situation, but it turned out to be far more challenging for me emotionally than I expected.
At the end of 2019, I made a decision to leave my regular job as …
A story of a family physician looking for work during the pandemic
As someone trained in Brené Brown’s curriculum for helping professionals, vulnerability is my jam.
As a physician? Not so much.
The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown already burned-out health care providers into the arena with more than just a shortage of equipment. We are now expected to risk our own lives caring for others, which was not part of the original job description. Medical providers are not Marines, nor do we work for …
Vulnerability is challenging but necessary for health care professionals
In late March, on what is known as Match Day, graduating medical students like myself found out where we would continue training as residents. This has always been an exciting but stressful time. This year it is more than that. On top of the countless challenges of starting residency, we are becoming doctors on the front lines of a pandemic.
How …
I’m a new doctor, and I’m scared about the other threat to my colleagues’ lives
Multiple times a week, I get messages asking some variation of, “How are you holding up?” I am neither an anesthesiologist, critical care, or ER physician, so I’m not three inches away from exposure while intubating patients with coronavirus. I am also not a nurse or respiratory therapist in a room dozen of times a day administering life-saving medications, performing vital assessments, or carefully managing the oxygen lifeline. I’m certainly …
Doctors, how are you holding up? You could answer in one of 5 ways.
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