It’s Monday morning at 7:15 a.m. Our kids, ages 6 and 9, have just finished breakfast, and they know to get their shoes on to go for a walk. We are hand-in-hand, slowly waking up as we put one foot in front of the other. We ambled down our neighborhood…
Have you ever felt completely overwhelmed both at work and at home? Perhaps you’re thinking, my job as an anesthesiologist isn’t anxiety-provoking enough; I should probably homeschool my kids at the same time. When’s the last time you uttered the phras…
Do you remember those old cartoons with the angel or good guy on one shoulder and the little devil or bad guy on the other? Of course, the good guy was always trying to keep the character out of mischief, and certainly, the little devil was doing quite…
COVID-19 has rapidly spread across the nation, leading to the implementation of stringent social distancing guidelines by local and regional authorities. In a desperate effort to limit infection rates, in-person social interactions have been reduced, a…
The Canadian federal government recently announced it would fund at least one million blood tests to track the novel coronavirus over the next two years. This is a step in the right direction. But is it enough? How do we know if we are testing the ri…
While 1 in 5 Americans live with a mental illness and almost half of U.S. adults will experience one during their lifetime, the events of the past several weeks remind us that raising awareness around mental health is critical for everyone. While it’s …
The World Health Organization (WHO) says there is currently “no evidence” showing that people who have recovered from the coronavirus are not at risk of becoming infected again. “Some governments have suggested that the detection of a…
In a previous article, I have described the physician burnout epidemic as a raging river whose features included safety nets designed to catch people before “going over the falls,” the need to teach individual survival skills (e.g., resilience), evalua…
Before becoming a certified registered nurse anesthetist (CRNA), I was a surgical intensive care unit (SICU) nurse for decades. During that time, I often saw patients during their greatest time of need – trauma victims, transplant recipients, patients …
I was in medical school when the world saw the news of the Zika and Ebola viruses, but never have I seen mass hysteria to this level for COVID-19. No longer is coronavirus what is depicted in a copy of First Aid for the USMLE Step 1, where it says coro…
