Category: Conditions

We are not past the risk of COVID-19

If you’re like me and you don’t live in a state that has already started re-opening, you are likely taking a lot of walks. Regardless of where you are in the U.S., I think we can all agree that if you cough or sneeze in any public setting, you automati…

Loneliness is a silent epidemic crying out to be heard

She reached for my hand, her hands gnarled, the skin fragile, translucent, road mapped by bluish veins: Hands that had done much in her 87 years. She looked at me from her hospital bed and with voice trembling, her eyes tearing, spoke words that penetr…

Finding hope in the COVID-19 pandemic

I am a 41-year old physician in the Phoenix metropolitan area. In the course of several unforgettable weeks in March 2020, my life, like every American’s, had been drastically flipped on its head. While I feel fortunate to be able to continue to have e…

Alfred Hitchcock, COVID-19, and the MacGuffin

The last couple of months in a world with COVID-19 have felt absurd, incomprehensible, like something out of a movie.  Most of us hunker down in our homes and wear masks whenever we’re out.  Those who work in patient care settings try to limit risk, bo…

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…