Category: Conditions

It doesn’t matter whether it’s COVID or cancer: We need to unite all to cure the one

Like other physicians, the past few months have left me with a multitude of feelings; helplessness, fear, anger, and uncertainty among them. As an oncologist, I’ll confess, there’s another emotion I’ve been grappling with…frustration.  As of mid-May, t…

It doesn’t matter whether it’s COVID or cancer: We need to unite all to cure the one

Like other physicians, the past few months have left me with a multitude of feelings; helplessness, fear, anger, and uncertainty among them. As an oncologist, I’ll confess, there’s another emotion I’ve been grappling with…frustration.  As of mid-May, t…

How coronavirus took my grandfather’s life

As a first-year internal medicine resident in NYC, the physical and emotional toll this has placed on me is unmeasurable. My attending physician reminds me of someone commanding a battlefield: my “allied” residents, doctors that chose different special…

What John Snow and cholera tell us about the COVID pandemic

It’s hard to imagine that someone could die from diarrhea. If you live in America today, you’ve likely never heard of anyone with cholera, and certainly never of anyone dying from diarrhea. Yet, in the middle of the nineteenth century, it was fairly co…

Medical care is being rationed, but not be in the way you think

As the pandemic loomed, there was widespread concern about running out of crucial medical resources, such as mechanical ventilators. We watched as the crisis escalated in Italy and elsewhere, where hospitals seemed overwhelmed. We prepared for the surg…

Enduring the pandemic: How to support your friend on the frontlines

Troubled by the volume of patients dying before they could even be taken out of ambulances, a New York emergency physician recently ended her own life. Are we all just vital statistics, waiting to be calculated? COVID-19 has infected and killed more th…

My professional life battling an RNA virus

I feel like I am reliving a bad dream. The race to find a treatment and/or cure to SARS-CoV-2 is reminiscent of decades of practicing gastroenterology while hepatitis C roamed the hospital wards as a death sentence for many. I found myself recently rec…

A vaccine alone will not be enough to recover from the impact of COVID-19: Emotional antibodies against it are needed as well

I was seven years old when I first got my heart broken. I was swiftly rebuffed by my second-grade crush, Brett who, upon getting gently pecked on the cheek by me one afternoon following recess, grimaced and began aggressively wiping off the invisible r…

Comparing the preparedness of hurricanes to pandemics

As I stand in line at a Tampa Lowe’s today in the middle of a global pandemic, I cannot help but note the vast differences in people’s behavior around me. There is a complete dichotomy in the ways in which individuals are responding to COVID-19. Some c…

Emergency psychiatry during COVID-19

The reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic in the comprehensive psychiatric emergency program (CPEP) began insidiously, with an initial sense of unease. Patients are brought into CPEP when they pose a danger to themselves or others. Often they are brought b…