I had to earn my “stripes” in ICU. After I graduated from nursing school, the “big” hospitals wouldn’t take me into the ICU, as I had no experience as an ICU nurse. Back in the early 1980s, there was no such thing as an internship program. I desperatel…
A tale of two pandemics: Around the time of the coronavirus outbreak, 2019 also marked a full century since the death of Sir William Osler, who revolutionized medical training. Despite some lingering debate over whether Dr. Osler’s pneumonia-related de…
An excerpt from Parenting in a Pandemic: How to help your family through COVID-19. When my husband and I made the decision to purchase a house outside of New York City, the prior owners left behind a trampoline. The trampoline is big, above ground, and…
Amidst the crushing human and economic carnage inflicted by the COVID-19 pandemic, one innocent bystander has been cowering in the dark corner of medicine’s past, clinging to its final breaths of iconicity: the beloved stethoscope. For over two centuri…
One commonality amongst all reporting associated with the COVID-19 pandemic: “unprecedented.” Unprecedented circumstances, unprecedented symptomatology, unprecedented prevalence, and now, unprecedented velocity. “300 million doses of a safe, effective …
Imagine a future where you wake up, go to the bathroom, pick up a small strip of paper, and put it in a tube with your saliva and saline. By the time you are done with part of your morning routine, within 15 minutes or so, the paper will tell you if t…
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” – Albert Einstein “Mr. Thomas, are you OK?…
There is absolutely no playbook for what we are all experiencing today. The changes coming at us have been swift, mercurial, and frightening. Governments, businesses, nonprofits, and individuals have scrambled to cope with relentless waves of chaos in …
Throughout 2020, the United States has been playing catchup against the coronavirus. As several well-researched articles have noted, lack of appropriate and timely response has been at the forefront and can be attributed to numerous factors including t…
It was April 5, 2020. In the months prior, I imagined, she had been grappling with the isolation of her newfound unemployment. The pandemic’s solidarity was possibly a relief: the rare solace of the permission to take a pause. Her new days were…
