I had known AR for eight days before she passed away. AR’s medical record was littered with phrases all too familiar in the field of medicine: she had “poor insight into the severity of her disease” and was “insisting on all res…
Category: Hospital-Based Medicine
A photographic exploration of the physician’s inner life
I entered my Manhattan apartment around midnight, roughly an hour after observing a transplant team recover kidneys and a liver from a young patient newly pronounced dead. Still wearing scrubs, I sat down on my bed, and, like a ghostly twin or guardian…
The first time of death
Keeping someone alive? I could do that. After all, that’s what medical school taught, ways to save lives. Give me a disease, and I could find the algorithm. Death, however, was murky, messy, and confusing. An algorithm does not exist. There is no…
How a code profoundly affected this physician [PODCAST]
“There is a small amount of literature about secondary trauma. This means that the people who respond to trauma (firefighters, police, doctors, EMTs, etc.) experience PTSD from experiences they were not the primary victims of. I haven’t read the …
Prioritizing patient safety during a global pandemic
A guest column by the American Society of Anesthesiologists, exclusive to KevinMD. The refrigerated trucks had not yet left our parking lot when I got an email from the IT department. It was late spring 2020, and deploying a new electronic health recor…
Unrequited: love in the time of COVID-19 [PODCAST]
“If you knew we are like the ‘Two Fridas,’ that our hearts are connected, would you change your mind? Would you stop as you are about to cut the artery feeding your heart and mine? If you knew that when you cry because of your lonelin…
A soul that never loses faith
I am so tired. Not in the usual “hard day at work,” but in a “deep-in-my-soul” tired. I am exhausted. I am heading into my third year as system medical director, where I lead a system-wide palliative medicine program in rural he…
Multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children: a pediatric hospitalist’s conversation
Them: “I have never heard of this.” Me: “That’s OK, let me explain what is going on. Your child has a condition called multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children, which we call MIS-C. We see this condition after a COVID infe…
Medication management and how consultant pharmacists can help
Management of medications is sometimes handled sub-optimally, at least in the United States. At the extreme, physicians who prescribe multiple medications prescribe some medications that treat the side effects of other medications. This could be consid…
A shout out to small hospitals [PODCAST]
“I’m a small-time doc in a small town, and I work at a small hospital in the Midwest, and I’m proud of it. The huge university hospitals (like Cleveland Clinic) get all the glory (especially in society and in the press), but small hospitals like …
