After 33 years as an ICU RN, I had finally decided I couldn’t do this anymore. It was my last nightshift. The last shift convinced me I had made the right decision. The CNA and I went door to door to turn each ICU patient that was not capable of turnin…
I enter the hospital to work again. I must work as I have three small children and a husband presently out of work because of COVID. He is “non-essential.” A violinist is playing at the employee entrance. I know they do this to lift our spirits. But it…
I am a critical care and emergency medicine physician, I have had COVID-19 infection twice, and I’m tired. My first infection was early on in the pandemic. I had to place a Blakemore tube in a young man who was going to die from his massive bleeding f…
As I’ve written before, I have to confess I’ve never been a huge fan of pathways and protocols. They often struck me as rigid and insensitive to the nuances of differences between patients. There are also times when they are just absurd whe…
I have a video visit in the pulmonary clinic with one of my favorite patients. I ask her how she’s doing and wave to her husband sitting in the background of the living room where she is set up. Deborah says, “We’re good. We’re healthy. We are staying …
Cardiologists with national reputations were available at a hospital just an hour away. I had connections there and could get what I was sure would be better care for my mother than she would receive in the small hospital where she had been taken follo…
She was dead when we walked in the room. Lungs ventilated, kidneys dialyzed, on pressors to maintain enough tension within her blood vessels to keep blood traveling to her brain and with a tentatively beating heart, but dead, nonetheless. The microbes …
Late one evening, an ICU physician calls a family to say Dad’s breathing rate had slowed to such an extent that he did not believe Dad would survive the night without life support. This seasoned doctor added that he had never seen patients come back fr…
I’d like to preface this story by saying that the majority of the intensivists I have worked with have been exceptional, caring, and professional. We had all established a good camaraderie, and we had mutual respect for each other. We worked well toget…
I sat outside my patient’s ICU room, my eyes glancing from his chart to him and his wife. The picture was grim. My patient, Tom, was a 56-year-old man, severely ill from decompensated cirrhosis, was admitted for the third time in a month with hypothe…
