Around three weeks ago, my 72-year-old patient, Mr. J., woke up feeling severely short of breath. He felt unusually tired, noticed a dry cough, and felt achy in his arms and legs. Suspicious of COVID-19, he and his wife called an ambulance and went to the nearest New York City emergency room.
At first, the doctors too thought it was COVID-19. However, a chest X-ray, CT scan, and a series of …
Cause unknown: the burden of diagnosis
On Friday, March 27, 2020, California went on lockdown in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. It changed every Californian’s life, including my own. As the newly appointed chief scribe, the possibility that I would be jobless by the time Monday rolled around, was the last of my worries. What would happen to the patients who depended on our care? Or the physicians, nurses, and administrators that kept the center …
Charting in uncharted territory: Scribing during COVID-19
As a fellow physician colleague, I felt compelled to address what medical personnel is experiencing in the COVID-19 pandemic. Needless to say, we’ve never been here before, and I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the gravity of the situation, its effects on trainees and attending physicians across the globe. While this is not a discussion about the virus, I urge you to please follow credible sources of information, …
Words of encouragement to physicians and trainees during the pandemic
Some media outlets and public figures have heralded the ongoing pandemic as a great equalizer, referencing the pathogen’s indiscriminate spread and disregard for national borders and tax brackets.
The sobering mortality statistics, however, dispense any notion of an equal-opportunity crisis, revealing a familiar theme among public health challenges in America: significant racial disparities exist, and communities of color are disproportionately affected.
CDC data show that blacks account for 29% of confirmed infections …
COVID is not a great equalizer
An excerpt from The View From The Wrong Side Of The Day: A Story About Nursing, PTSD And Other Shenanigans.
I’m not exactly sure when things first started to get bad for me. Thinking back, it was all rather like the analogy of the frog in the …
An emergency room nurse diagnosed with PTSD
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
That is a common question you hear in the setting of medical education. I think I heard it for the first time on my first clinical rotation. A little background, I was a non-traditional medical student. I worked as a clinical pharmacist for ten years prior to starting medical school. When the resident asked me that question, I was initially a …
The medical education question that needs to be changed
We can’t un-bungle our nation’s COVID-19 response. Political leaders acted too slowly; health agencies committed unforced errors with testing kits and, amid the confusion, an information fog settled over the land.
Americans remain afraid, perplexed, and …
3 coronavirus facts Americans must know before returning to work and school
In a perfect world, an electronic medical record would aggregate a patient’s medical information from all health care providers into a single, comprehensive record that could be easily accessed by any provider with the patient’s permission. This information could reduce the risk of medical errors, duplicate testing, and inappropriate treatment and the associated cost of these mistakes. It could also be lifesaving in the event of a medical emergency that …
What can patients do to lower the risk of errors in their electronic medical records?
The COVID-19 pandemic has turned medical education upside-down. There has been massive disruption from exclusively virtual pre-clerkship courses to delayed clerkships to canceled graduation proceedings. After weeks of speculation, we’ve learned how the pandemic will disrupt the 2020-2021 residency application cycle. The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) now recommends that all residency interviews be conducted virtually. While this is a wise recommendation, out of concern for public safety, I …
To the AAMC: Recommend an interview limit or else this year’s residency match may be a disaster
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
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?
Get free updates delivered free to your inbox.
