You won’t find me at any haunted houses this weekend. I don’t need any costumed creeps jumping out at me when I least (or most) expect it. I’ve never been a huge fan of strobe lights, fog machines, bad makeup, or canned Vincent Price laughter.
My day job is scary enough.
Some like to say that anesthesia is 99 percent boredom and 1 percent terror. They’re half right. The 99 percent is rarely boring. …
Boo! Being a physician can be downright scary
I have a mentor who is quite gifted at getting me to break a sweat in the OR. No matter how well an operation is going, she’ll have me set my instruments down. “If this doesn’t work, what’s your plan B?” We discuss how variations in anatomy, damage to critical structures, or unanticipated pathology could change our operative plan. She challenges me to not only consider plan B, but plans …
The most skilled surgeons are confident and humble
Nearly a month before our national presidential election, a video surfaced online capturing a conversation between Presidential candidate Donald Trump and reporter Billy Bush. During this 2005 “private” conversation between the two, Trump lewdly brags to Bush about kissing and groping women without their consent. He is even heard boasting he can “get away” with this behavior because of his celebrity status. Trump has been heavily criticized for his words …
The unacceptable cost of silence
I am constantly in awe of the patients I want to treat. I cannot fathom their strength to embrace their identity while overcoming prejudice and discrimination. I do not know what it must be like to fear being your true self everyday.
But I do know what it’s like to be told to keep my career interests quiet. When I was interviewing for residency, my goals of serving transgender …
It’s time we embrace the known benefits of gender-confirming surgery
Around 10 a.m., I had just finished seeing a patient in office when my pager went off:
“Yellow Trauma — 3 y.o. male: Alleged fall down 7 cement steps, suspected abuse.”
Our team dropped everything and descended upon the emergency department in our hospital. By the time we had reached the patient, a dozen ER nurses and doctors had already surrounded his bed in the trauma bay. The patient had been intubated …
Why this doctor shares his patients’ stories
Liver transplantation for alcoholic liver disease has been controversial since the advent of the procedure. The perception that alcohol-related liver disease is self-inflicted combined with concerns of a high risk of recidivism to alcohol use, recurrent alcoholic liver disease, and non-compliance post-transplant has led a lack of support for transplantation for alcoholic patients in the public and among physicians. After initially avoiding transplants in this group of patients, the majority …
Transplantation for alcoholic liver disease: 6-month rule or death sentence?
You may have read about the recent tragic deaths of two healthy children — Marvelena Rady, age 3, and Caleb Sears, age 6 — in California dental offices. Unfortunately, they aren’t the first children to die during dental procedures, and unless things change, they probably won’t be the last.
State Senator Jerry Hill has asked the Dental Board of California (DBC) to review California’s present laws and regulations …
Children at the dentist’s office: Who’s watching them?
We are in the middle of an all-day ENT screening clinic at Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital in Kenya. The local ENT physicians have scheduled about 100 patients to return to see our American team to be evaluated for surgery during our visit. We have already seen several people with baseball-sized tumors in their parotids, thyroids, or necks. The surgical schedule for the next few days is getting full.
A thirteen-year-old …
Working in Kenya reminds me of earlier times in my training
Coming in to work at 8 a.m. was indeed a luxury for me. As my fellow anesthesiologists would concur, our life begins at 7 a.m. on a daily basis. Some administrative duty made this possible for me one day. This was a first for me, and I felt compelled to put down my musings in writing.
Preparing for this morning treat, I had made sure to set my alarm for thirty …
The joys of coming to work 1 hour later
“I come as one. I stand as ten thousand.”
– Maya Angelou
I am a surgeon. I am proud of this fact partly because I am the first in my family to go to medical school. I am also proud of this fact because I recognize that me becoming a surgeon has been less about me and more of a collective and cumulative effort of my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and countless other …
The silent lessons of my grandmother
Like much of America, my family is obsessed with everything Hamilton. We jammed to the soundtrack all summer. The season culminated with a late August trip to the show which I described on social media as the best day of my life. Seeing the show, the actors, the set, and choreography, come to life with lyrics we had all memorized was such an amazing experience.
I cried.
Part of that was pinching …
The Hamilton lyrics that resonate with this trauma surgeon
Online reviews for doctors are here to stay. Letting patients review their doctor sounds great right? What could go wrong?
That being said, there are several things that reviews do that is, in fact, damaging to the care of patients in medicine. Here are six things that many physicians now do in the world of online reviews.
Focus on showmanship not results. “Sometimes I spend extra time on the exam even when I …
6 unintended consequences of online doctor reviews
Early on a random Tuesday morning, I walked into the burn unit and found my 87-year-old patient, Mr. Gray, in septic shock. While Mr. Gray’s burn injury was small by our standards, it appeared that the sequelae of the injury might prove fatal. I called Mr. Gray’s wife to obtain consent for a vascular catheter through which I planned to begin continuous dialysis and was surprised when she declared, “No …
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Are you 100 percent sure your customers know where you are located? If you are like me, you think the answer is an obvious “yes.” But in reality, I did not have a clue because I wasn’t aware of local SEO.
SEO, traffic and ranking on the “first page of Google” are what marketing agencies stress to physicians, but I found out there is a side branch of SEO called local …
Google thinks I sell mobile homes. But I’m a hernia surgeon.
“We do not remember days, we remember moments.”
– Cesare Pavese
“A plane! A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center.”
The surgical case was moving along steadily. Another surgeon had removed a skin lesion from the patient’s neck, and the pathologist had not been certain if it was a cancer. I had recommended removing the scar and several of the nearby lymph nodes. The surgery had just started and was going …
“I graduated this July and took the QE (written general surgery boards) on July 19th. I got my results today, and I failed. Not only did I fail but my score placed me in the 5th percentile. Needless to say, I’m disappointed. You hear stories about CE (oral exam) failure but never about QE failure. I never blew the ABSITE out of the water (50, 29, 20, 34, …
You failed your surgical boards. What’s next?
“Please don’t cut off my pants,” he pleaded. “I am homeless, and they are my only pants. Please.”
He could say these words as we were conducting our initial assessment in the trauma bay so at least he was hemodynamically stable with an intact airway at that moment in time. However, he had arrived seconds earlier with potentially life-threatening injuries as a level 1 trauma activation. Based on the location of …
Getting him a new pair of pants was the least that we could do
After rotating in the ICU, I began to wonder about the limitations of modern medicine. In a short time, we have come a long way with the discovery of antibiotics, high-resolution imaging, and the development of advanced surgical procedures. The medical field saves millions of lives. Nowadays, people do not go to a hospital to die; they go to be healed. As physicians, we are very skilled at extending life.
Heart …
Summer is heating up, and so is the election rhetoric. In this year’s campaign for the White House, when it comes to verbally attacking each other, neither candidate seems to recognize any limits. Personally, I think this behavior reflects poorly on both candidates.
In heath care, it’s almost impossible to escape this negativity. The media devours and thrives upon it. In our hospitals, televisions in the doctor’s lounge, cafeteria and in …
It’s time to stop using the language of war in health care
It is too easy to lose your way as a physician when faced with the daily stress of real medicine. Spending time with the next generation of physicians gives me faith that we will always have a few doctors who stand out as not just competent, but caring healers.
My son is currently a surgical resident. After the break, is a letter I wrote to him when he was an intern. A …
A letter to my son, the surgeon
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