Category: Conditions

Addressing medical school needs for our frontline responders and health care providers

Coronavirus. Doctors. Nurses. PPE. Social distancing. Sound familiar? Our entire conversation about the COVID-19 pandemic surrounds those words and phrases. We see celebrities, companies, coworkers, family members, and friends donating PPE and money to…

Learning to cope with the pandemic from palliative care patients 

I’m a palliative care chaplain who provides spiritual support to patients with serious, life-changing, and for some, life-threatening, illnesses. A common story they tell is an illness, like a storm, blew them off their life’s map.  They fi…

A journey through time with a very modern foe

Come with me on this journey, this very ancient journey. To experience the age-old story of a very modern foe. This foe is invisible; it is neither living nor dead. You cannot smell it, and you cannot taste it. While it is not alive, it can become aliv…

COVID-19 blurs the line between physician and patient

The unspoken culture in medicine has been that to maintain objective professionalism – some measure of distance is encouraged between the clinician and the patient. From anatomy lab, students are encouraged to forget patients as fellow human bein…

COVID-19? We are not even ready for a hurricane.

The hurricane made landfall during the early morning hours. When I woke up, all I saw was devastation. Highway 288 transformed into a lake. The bayou running underneath was completely flooded with water spilling into the roads. The park, a place where …

Nurses do not get paid extra for being pharmacists

An excerpt from Nurses are Nuts. The pharmacy department plays a vital role in hospitals. They prepare and dispense medications. Sometimes the pharmacist will receive an order from the doctor on a med whose written dosage he is not sure of. In some cas…

From frontlines to sidelined: a resident’s experience on staying positive

On a gorgeous day in early March, I set out on my usual morning commute to clinic. The recent rain had turned the mountains green, there was some fresh snow atop Mount Baldy in the usually dry Inland Empire of Southern California, and the Lakers had ju…

Patients who slip through the cracks

As my surgery rotation commenced, I fully expected to be immersed in the unfamiliar territory of “scrubbing in” and “sterile fields.” While I discovered the difference between vertical and horizontal mattress sutures, two specif…

A physician-mother comforts her frightened, 6-year-old daughter

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…

An advertisement for COVID 2020

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…