One morning, I was sitting in resident lecture. This time was supposedly protected, but we realized fairly quickly that the work still had to be done, and “I had lecture” never really worked out well as an explanation.
By this time in the week, I had already worked 80 hours, and the luxury of sitting down for an hour in a row was the main upside to the lecture. I kept …
I am a pulmonary-critical care medicine physician. I had a medical issue in 2020 and was on limited call responsibilities. When I came back, it was in the throes of the first wave of COVID.
It goes without saying that the last three years or so have been very difficult for everyone in the medical profession. We lost a truly horrific number of patients to COVID — in the early days, …
My sister didn’t want to die from breast cancer. In the six years since her diagnosis of stage 4 breast cancer, she fought valiantly to stay healthy and to continue to live. A superb oncologist put her cancer into complete remission, which lasted for some time before it reappeared in distant lymph nodes but not in any viscera.
One weekend she complained of severe stomach pain and sought help at a …
I still get chills thinking about the moment I decided to go to medical school. I was bored in my college physiology class, watching the minute hand on the round lecture hall clock.
There were just a few minutes remaining in the class, and students were starting to pack up. The professor, Dr. Adams, said, “I want to talk about hemorrhage before you go.” His voice was getting lost in the …
ICU psychosis is a common phenomenon in hospitals. Most of us as clinicians deal with it well.
However, the ordeal changes when your loved one is struck with it. My grandmother, always admired for her storytelling skills, is now admitted with intestinal obstruction, and her worsening Parkinson’s has just escalated the intensity of her psychosis.
Now she tells me a story of a woman carrying knives, seeing blood everywhere, selling half the …
We were reminiscing recently at a brunch we set up. It had been many years since we had seen each other. Eventually, we went our separate ways. But we reconnected once again.
Anna was one of our night shift nurses. She was bright and articulate. She eventually became a preceptor and mentor to many new ICU nurses.
The “night shifters” are on an island of their own. We form a special family, …
I was on service as the attending physician recently, and it struck me how closely our sickest patients in the intensive care setting mirror the political mires of our country.
Usually, when I’m on service, it’s an all-consuming matter, with little time for media and external affairs. However, this time it was different: history in the making with a Supreme Court decision that eviscerated a woman’s right to choose, to care …
Five days before this story begins, where everything is upside down, and the end is the beginning.
Me, standing in my PICU, slowly approaching that cradle, then removing the medication, one by one, turning off the syringe pumps. Saying out loud the number of milliliters passed, where that line is trapped, that little division between the professional and me, the person.
Where I stopped being a doctor and became a woman holding …
It was a known fact — I was 4′ 11″ but I had a mouth on me to compensate. I was loud and noisy. Fellow nurses called me the “rebel without a cause.”
But I had a cause.
I knew I was David against Goliath. Almost everything became my cause. And I verbally fought my way through this iron-clad management structure.
I had to fight for the betterment of the patients, their survival, …
A small piece of lint is tickling my nose as I am desperately trying not to sneeze into the tight-fitting mask on my face. I know that I will not be able to adjust the mask as my gloves are sterile, and I am standing suspended over a patient’s body with my gloves patinaed with small drips of blood mixed with an antiseptic. The procedure is challenging as the patient …
Pneumonia is the deadliest of all hospital-acquired infections in the United States, costs 3 billion dollars per year and is the leading cause of new antibiotic initiation in hospitals. Hospital-acquired pneumonia is classified as either ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) or non-ventilator hospital-acquired pneumonia (NVHAP). For the past 15 years, VAP has dominated our attention, resulting in the wide implementation of evidence-based prevention strategies that have …
Why should doctors become involved in social media? I asked myself this same question a few years ago. My answer was, “I don’t know.” I saw no redeeming reason to get involved with social media as a physician. At the time, I just saw it as a social platform for posting cute family photos, funny pet videos, jokes, inspirational quotes, and links to entertaining stories. Sure, a lot of that …
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When was the last time you paused for a moment to feel your energy? I mean, really get in touch with the energy you hold inside your being?
Could it be that, as physicians, we have gotten so used to feeling stressed or drained at the end of the day that we’ve forgotten how to feel at ease and be in a state of joy as we take care of our …
So here I am. I just finished updating my CV so I can apply for associate professor this fall.
And I hadn’t touched it since last year. It needed a lot of work.
I look at this, and I think, “Wow.”
And then I also think: What about all the “stuff” that’s not on there?
The difficult pregnancies.
My son’s struggles his first 36 months of life.
My husband’s year-long deployment as a new mother of …
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 …
“The weekend after Isabelle’s discharge, I take my shoes outside onto the driveway. The sky is a brilliant blue, and green tinges of leaves poke through shells of buds; the wind slips through my fleece. I scrub the spots of blood with an antibacterial wipe, and tan shoe polish comes …
There is value in reflecting on the most difficult experiences, as it affords an opportunity to examine how we act, react and change in response to the forces around us. The most difficult experiences in medicine are often not discussed, as there is typically not a space in which to begin such stories. So, without further preamble or justification, here is my worst experience in medicine, one which I’ve never …
In the early evening, I stand in the grocery store checkout line. A young mother in front of me presses a pig-tailed toddler against her hip as she rummages for her credit card, and a man with silvered hair and a monogrammed shirt shifts impatiently behind me. As I watch the toddler, I’m hit with a twinge of nostalgia. I think of how I used to pull my daughter’s hair …
Where do I begin? Maybe at the beginning.
Let’s start with the degradation and devaluation of nurses across this country.
For decades, I lived the devaluing of nurses. Daily huddles from our nurse managers, ER nurses, ICU nurses, and behavioral health nurses. Emails and huddles about downsizing. Nurse-patient ratios. Decreasing nursing staff and increasing patients. ICU nurses typically had a 2:1 ratio and, depending on the patient’s acuity, a 1:1 ratio. But …
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