Author's posts
Make a difference, one life at a time
I was somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, heading to Ukraine “to make a difference,” or so I hoped. I was leading a medical mission to this beautiful yet poor and war-torn country. I was watching the movie First Man about the landing of Apollo 11 on the…
The times we need to be reminded why we went into this profession
Years ago, I watched an interview on TV with nurses who cared for a man dying of Ebola. Their words and actions continue to ring as true today during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic as they did then. Their compassion deeply moved me for this man dying…
The hug that reminded a cardiologist of the joy in medicine
The cardiologist was called STAT to the ED for a 50-year-old man with an acute STEMI. The man arrested eight times in the ED, each time successfully resuscitated. He finally stabilized to where he could be moved to the cardiac cath lab. The cardiologis…
A surgeon left his own son’s funeral to take care of your child
I recently read a story that struck close to home for me, and I suspect for nearly all of you in your medical careers at one time or another. It was a story of a surgeon called in urgently to the ED for a seriously injured young boy. The surgeon arrive…
A witness to desperate poverty and ever-present hopelessness
She shook her head no, eyes brimming with tears, chin quivering with emotion. Again, I told her that without further care, her son would never have use of his arm and possibly would die. Her voice trembling, she told me her husband would beat her if sh…
To be in medicine is to know grief, pain, and heartbreak in a personal way
“Grief never ends … but it changes. It’s a passage, not a place to stay. Grief is not a sign of weakness, nor a lack of faith … It is the price of love.” – Anonymous The “price of love”: We are now paying that price with the passing of Debb…
A Christmas wish: Thank you for the sacrifices you make and all you do to care for our patients
Christmas Eve 1990, Saudi Arabia, a few miles south of the Iraqi border – it is cold and dark as I lay on my cot, my sleeping bag around me, the constant hum of the generators in the background. I am listening to Pachabel’s Canon in D minor on my…
What is the physician’s greatest gift to patients?
I stood inside the door of “una chosa,” Spanish for “a hut” — the walls bamboo and sunbaked mud; a broom-swept dirt floor; two open windows partially covered by tattered cloth; no running water, no electricity. The acrid smell of smoke from the w…
We have been the precious gift of making a difference in the lives of others
“You that seek what life is in death, Now find it air that once was breath, New names unknown, old names gone: Till time end bodies, but souls none. Reader! Then make time, while you be, But steps to your eternity.” – Baron Brooke Fulke Greville,…
We are again at war with another, unseen, enemy
February 24, 1991, and I wait. I wait on the edge of my cot under the pitched canopy of my far-away canvas home; its sides pulsating from the ever-present wind; sand somehow traversing the walls, everything inside airbrushed a pastel tan; outside the s…
