As a family medicine physician, I am not sure about a whole lot as we turn into the third year of pandemic living. I can’t give you a decent prognosis of where Omicron is going to take us or how many it will take from us. I am not even sure of the public health approach at this moment where COVID seems to outsmart us repeatedly. (A reminder that this …
We need each other, as COVID pulls us apart
Don’t look in: No, this isn’t a typo, it’s the sentiment many of my colleagues and I feel right about now. After a long stretch of shifts over New Year’s, I needed a mental break, so I logged into my trusty Netflix account and front and center was Don’t Look Up, the Leonardo DiCaprio dark satire about a comet hurtling towards earth (spoiler alert) and humanities failed efforts to take …
Don’t look in. What you will see is uncomfortable.
In late November, the state of the COVID-19 pandemic shifted once more when South African scientists reported the discovery of a new SARS-CoV-2 variant named Omicron. When panic surrounding Omicron’s emergence set in, numerous countries instituted travel bans on South Africa and neighboring nations.
As a medical student, I have begun to examine COVID-19 epidemiology and policy decisions more closely. Given that Omicron is already circulating globally and …
Why travel bans in response to Omicron are harmful
I’m angry. The sound cut out again, for the fifth time in the last hour. “Why can’t I get through one telemedicine visit without some technical problem?” I ask myself. I can feel the chest discomfort, my shoulders tense, I start to flush, tell-tale signs of frustration and anger bubbling up. I did not go to medical school to become tech support. After 12 patients, it’s finally time for lunch. …
Telemedicine exhaustion is real
I would love to say 2021 outshone 2020. But I think sometime around mid-fall of last year, we realized the joke was, sadly, on humanity, and that was not going to happen.
Yes, we finally had vaccines (thank God and bless those involved forever), but the life purpose of a virus is to replicate, somehow, someway — and Delta was born.
The tragedy of the preceding winter still haunted all of us …
The pandemic has me angry, infuriated, demoralized, and scared
If you knew we are like the “Two Fridas,”
that our hearts are connected,
would you change your mind?
Would you stop
as you are about to cut
the artery feeding your heart and mine?
If you knew that when you cry because of your loneliness,
because of your longing for your family,
that I cry, too, (though behind your back,
after I have comforted you)
would you change your mind?
If you knew that your isolation,
with the tubes and gadgets
coming …
Unrequited: love in the time of COVID-19
“It’s my right not to be vaccinated. It’s my body.”
So goes the argument for the COVID anti-vaxxers, emphasizing personal freedom taking precedence over everything else. Unfortunately, and perhaps unfairly, we health care providers do not have that same freedom; our profession requires us to perform our duties despite the risks to us. We place ourselves in jeopardy each day we come to work, and we cannot simply refuse care for …
COVID vaccination: If not for yourself, then for the rest of us
When can a patient say “yes” or “no” to a recommended colonoscopy? A blood transfusion? A COVID vaccine?
As 2022 opens, health officials predict a tsunami of new coronavirus cases worldwide due to the Omicron and Delta variants. For more than a year, official messaging has been that vaccination is the way out of the pandemic.
But ongoing vaccine hesitancy has hindered progress. The Centers for …
Can patients just say no to treatment?
“You have to show proof that you have something wrong with you in order for you to get the medicine. I put forth, and I maintain that if I was white, I wouldn’t have to go through that.”
– Dr. Susan Moore.
In a 7-minute-and-22-second Facebook video documenting her treatment at a suburban hospital in Indiana, Dr. Susan Moore, a Black woman physician, articulated the collective desperation and frustration that was a …
The painful anniversary of Dr. Susan Moore
Before there was doom-scrolling, there were sad books. For me, it was Chapter 18 in Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. The chapter is a fictional portrayal of Mr. Grossman imagining his mother’s last words. The protagonist—modeled on the author—and their two mothers have the same fate at the hands of the Nazis. I tried several times to get through that chapter, through that letter, and through the book. I …
The letter this physician wants to write to her patients
Since the first cases of COVID-19 started trickling into the U.S. in January 2020 (or December, depending on what sources you believe), leaders have made confident statements promising containment, to eradicate the virus, to provide resources for hospitals in need, to research and identify treatments that work, etc.
I think that we can agree that no matter what side of the aisle you are on, having a highly charged controversial presidential …
It’s no secret that rural hospitals have been struggling. According to online data from the University of North Carolina, 137 rural hospitals have closed in the U.S. since 2010.
In Appalachia, the rural hospital where I work, which is staffed by a single hospitalist, has been “in the crosshairs” since I arrived in 2016 and has been limping along with subsidies from our regional health system. …
Did the unvaccinated just save my rural hospital?
Almost two years since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have confronted the illness and loss of millions of lives and the sad and dangerous reality of having a health care system and a society full of moral gaps, inequities, and disparities. This unprecedented and complex situation challenged all of us on many levels. While facing high levels of unexpected fear, uncertainty, and distress, the well-known socio-cultural and demographic …
COVID-19 vaccination: the Latinx experience
Despite health professionals’ efforts at conveying the effectiveness of immunization, many African Americans remain skeptical about the COVID-19 vaccine.
Getting to the root of this distrust is critical as the Delta and Omicron variants stoke up the number of positive COVID-19 cases across the United States. And the spread of the virus is not uniform. According to the National Vital Statistics System, Black Americans incur the highest COVID-19 …
COVID-19 and the Tuskegee syphilis study
I spent the past year and a half of this pandemic getting a degree in quality, safety, and leadership. Though there were days, nights, and weeks where I simply did not know how I could finish the work or go on, I never realized how much I needed the work to help me process what is happening around us. To help me navigate my rage at the state of our …
We have been forced into a mass casualty scenario
March 2020. Administrators informed us that primary care physicians would be deployed to the “front lines” – either the emergency department or the COVID-19 wards. When I shared my news with my 21-year-old daughter, she cried and hugged me and said, “I don’t want you to die.”
Fate intervened, and I didn’t get deployed. By the time I was up, the numbers improved, and it was time to return to my …
What this primary care physician learned from her COVID-19 infection
In 2017, I read an article called “I Don’t Know How to Explain to You that You Should Care About Other People.”
I don’t remember the details of the article; the name was enough.
As we enter our third year of a global pandemic, I think about that often.
I don’t know how to explain to you that COVID is real.
I don’t know how to talk to the ex who …
I can’t make you care. But you should.
With apologies to the late Yankees slugger Yogi Berra, for pandemic-weary Americans, it’s like “déjà vu all over again,” as new lockdowns and mandatory mask mandates are being imposed across the globe.
The latest threat, the Omicron COVID-19 variant, has been a major source of breakthrough infections, including among those who have been fully vaccinated and boosted, such as United States Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker.
Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, …
Covaxin: Doomed to the dugout or ready to join the field of vaccine options?
Frankly, I am tired of this pandemic. I am tired of the death. I am tired of the destruction of families and the obliteration of vulnerable individuals’ social supports. I am tired of human issues being politicized and used as weapons to divide us further. I am tired of people being politically correct at the expense of what is better for society.
So, let me be bold, and say something almost …
Unless we get back to the basics, there will be no end to the pandemic
This year, I lost too many close and extended family members to COVID-19. As a medical student, I was stunned to see a virus take a grasping toll on my life and surroundings. It was frightening, to say the least. Throughout the period of grief, which I’m still experiencing, I’ve learned a lot and have become more knowledgeable. Unfortunately, I learned that there was a common denominator among those …
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