In December 2020, almost a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States lost 140,000 jobs, and all of them were held by women. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought unrivaled and unprecedented challenges, and the damage done to gender equity in the workplace has been pervasive, and physicians and …
In July 2020, we became essential workers. We threw on our scrubs, put our stethoscopes around our necks, and walked to work for our first day as pediatricians.
Six months later, I have had a moment to reflect on what it has meant to be “essential.” I have come to realize that the simple act of learning from and taking care of our patients has been essential. “Being essential” has looked …
Being “essential” has been overwhelming
She was the brightest thing in that white room.
Warm brown eyes locked on mine. She peered out at me from behind an oxygen mask, a small woman hidden under a cloud of brown hair. Usually, when I came into the room to examine her, she was lying flat on her stomach, her chin propped up on her hands in benediction like she was reading a Bible. As soon as I …
A frontline physician’s experience with a COVID patient
Over the past year, we have experienced massive organizational change at an unprecedented pace. Traditionally, we could spend weeks planning how to best make a change in our workplaces, but COVID-19 was anything but traditional. Our emergency department at Saint Barnabas Health System in Bronx, NY, needed to pivot on a daily and even hourly basis, and to do so took planning and effort. In general, change is difficult, and …
How COVID accelerates change: Bridging business principles with emergency medicine
It was a cold winter morning in January 2021. Another day in the ICU, another day caring for critically ill patients with complex medical conditions, another day caring for patients on their death beds, another day interacting with patients’ families and their emotions, another day of putting on a strong face for my patients, their loved ones, my ICU family and my trainees, another day of giving bad news to …
Critical care physicians have been through hell
I have written a lot about how COVID has changed me. Changed medicine. Changed America. I have written about it as a pivot point. A way to build a better medical infrastructure. I have alluded to how we can use innovation, advocacy, and listening to turn 2020 into an opportunity for change. How we can use it as a way to finally admit that health disparities exist, Black Lives Matter, …
I keep going because I miss them. And I miss me.
More and more, we physicians have “bosses,” and, as in any field, the quality of those bosses varies widely.
When the White House Coronavirus Task Force was unveiled in the spring, with the president and two of the nation’s leading infectious disease physicians, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, standing shoulder to shoulder around the podium in the White House briefing room, there was promise aplenty. Many believed that this …
Dealing with a bad boss: lessons from Dr. Fauci
Physicians in general are a pretty intelligent group of professionals. However, we sometimes make the mistake of thinking that we must also know a lot about almost everything because we know a lot about one particular thing. However, given the exploding pace of advancing knowledge, that idea is hubristic. But it isn’t just science and technology where we fall short.
During the COVID pandemic, one of the things most contentious has …
Why do people keep going to church?
“Please wait. The meeting host will let you in soon.”
I am in the virtual waiting room for my weekly therapy session, the little waiting room box dragged to the side of my screen as I respond to clinical messages. I put off stretching to reply to an email, remaining in the chair I’ve been sitting in all morning hosting my own virtual visits for patients.
I hate my chair; I hate …
Why this physician misses the waiting room
Don’t let images deceive you. You may think you see everything in my picture after getting the vaccine, but you don’t. Let me take you behind the scenes of my life this past year. As I can only imagine what being behind the scenes of your life has been like for you.
What you don’t see in the picture is my yearlong of agony, tears, hard decisions, and losses, like all …
Getting the COVID vaccine: a behind the scenes look
I received my COVID vaccine on December 21st before starting an ER shift; sitting in the cold, plastic chair in a hallway-turned-vaccine-clinic, I tipped my head back to blink tears into submission as I reflected on making it this far in the pandemic without contracting COVID. Four days later, after three twelve-hour shifts, I tested positive for COVID.
The COVID vaccine did not cause my positive result; getting exposed …
COVID vaccines: side effects, myths, and madness
I had a dream last night. I dreamt that my father wasn’t dead.
It was jumbled in so many ways. But I was able to talk to him in my “sleep.”
I watched This is Us before bed. The episode where Randall questions whether William lied to him about his mother’s death. William saw her die, but she was revived after he ran away with Randall. Somehow, that made my mind wander …
I lost my father during the global pandemic
When the federal government executed Corey Johnson at the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, on the 14th of January, 2021, he was COVID-19 positive. He was executed while suffering from a highly contagious respiratory illness that is killing over 4,000 Americans each day. Despite his positive diagnosis for COVID-19 and his risk for infecting those around him with this respiratory illness, Corey Johnson’s execution was not postponed. Who …
State sanctioned executions in the age of COVID-19
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With COVID-19 vaccines being administered to our front-line health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities, we are beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel of this pandemic. Yet, given the time-limited nature of the vaccine’s development, we have yet to learn the extent to which vaccinated people can spread the virus. The COVID-19 vaccinations prevent disease, but we know little about if …
How the vaccinated may become the next super-spreaders
As I write today, COVID-19 has killed more than 380,000 people in the United States. The country is averaging close to 200,000 cases per day and has a record number of patients hospitalized at this time. This trend shows no signs of abating. Unfortunately, this only means that the number of hospitalized patients and the number of patients dying will continue to trend up in the coming days and weeks.
Amidst …
Can we stop wasting the COVID-19 vaccine?
Those were the headlines in one of the Sunday papers.
He was around fifty years old and with his wife. They stood in front of me in the supermarket. He was in shorts and a light blue t-shirt, wearing beach flip-flops. Standard casual wear for the holiday beach town where I work at Netcare Kingsway Hospital in Amanzimtoti, on the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast of South Africa.
I could see him reading the …
As I watched the vaccine rollout take place over the past month, all I can say is that I am not surprised. I watched hospital executives who never see patients jump the line, doctors having their healthy nannies vaccinated, and health systems trusted with vaccine doses have essentially no plan. It’s like we didn’t have 9 months to figure this out. All I can say is that this is the …
Vaccinating athletes will show us if the vaccine works
It is stressful enough to live with heart disease. Now, with a global pandemic, access to health care providers has shifted from in-office to telemedicine in many instances. There are challenges for patients with heart disease in this context:
Pandemic challenges for patients with heart disease
Developing the COVID-19 vaccine was the first monumental milestone on a long and arduous journey to achieving the entire U.S. population’s vaccination.
One of the barriers to achieving this task is the absence of a reliable, scalable way to uniquely identify each individual before or after they receive the vaccine. Furthermore, in the absence of this unique identifier, it is extremely difficult to reliably use existing state or regional data repositories …
A national patient identifier would make vaccinating the entire U.S. population easier
Canadians breathed a huge sigh of relief when the federal government approved the first COVID-19 vaccine and saw the first immunizations take place. The end of the pandemic and the prospect of a return to normal, whatever that means, became a real possibility.
Rolling out a national vaccination program will be no small feat. In addition to the basic logistical challenges of moving volatile product throughout the …
Not all frontline health workers who need priority vaccination are doctors and nurses
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