The first time I had ever been present when a patient was in cardiac arrest, I was a medical student, spending a night in the emergency department of a small local hospital. An old woman was rushed in from home after she had fallen over at the dinner t…
Whatever we call it—burnout, moral injury, disillusionment, work fatigue, hopelessness—these did not appear to apply to me before the COVID-19 pandemic. I tried to keep up on discussions about how moral injury is a pervasive and destructive force leadi…
This past year, I served as an internal medicine resident at St. John’s Riverside Hospital in Yonkers, New York. And this month, I officially started my anesthesiology residency at Brown. Working as a doctor amid the coronavirus pandemic has been…
“In the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, I am both hopeful and inspired as well as disappointed. I see those angry that their ideas or opinions conflict with science. Instead of the steady path and hard work of building bridges, they create divisio…
It’s mid-summer. Time for family vacations, camping trips, backyard barbeques with family and friends, all the great things we look forward to during those cold days of winter. However, where do most of us find ourselves right now? I’ll tel…
It has been a summer of disconcerting milestones for the US. Over 4 million people have now been infected with the novel coronavirus, and over 140,000 have lost their lives according to data from Johns Hopkins University. The country reported over 77,0…
This is the million-dollar question that I’ve been asked over and over again by distraught parents wanting to do right by their children. Parents want to have their children stay home so they can keep them healthy and safe. At the same time, they are w…
“As COVID-19 devastates America and the world, I hope that fundamental change to our health care system results from its horrific exposé. Without COVID-19, the pressures placed on physicians are already immense. In the age of COVID-19, these pres…
I held back my tears as I headed home that day from work. A sense of impending doom and fear of the future was clutching my heart, something like I have never experienced before. For the first time in my medical career, my mind was preoccupied with tho…
A lifetime ago, when we first heard of a novel virus making the rounds in China, I was added to several physician groups on Facebook. The discussion surrounding the virus was academic; the distance made it easy to be objective, speculation on how sever…
