“If I make a mistake, my patient could go home in a body bag.” I don’t recall whom I first heard this from, but it stuck in my mind as terrifying thoughts do. And we wonder why burnout in medicine is a thing. Mistakes in medicine can cause …
Category: Hospital-Based Medicine
Advocating for a sick parent by confronting physician bias [PODCAST]
“I spent the first three days sitting next to my dad’s hospital bed, watching his chest rise and fall slowly. He was asleep the majority of the time, fighting off something unknown. Anytime he moved, I jumped up from my chair and stood where he c…
Hospitals are some of the least hospitable places
Dear new intern: As you embark on a year that will prove at different times stimulating, frustrating, rewarding, and exhausting, you’ve likely already been inundated with suggestions on how to thrive, or at the very least, survive what lies ahead. Whil…
A physician’s personal great resignation
It’s been a year since I retired from almost 40 years as a pediatrician (most of that time as a pediatric hospitalist). What have I learned? What surprised me? 1. I have finally caught up on my sleep. I have been convinced that I still had a cumu…
Mixed emotions on Doctors’ Day
So many mixed emotions as I scrolled the multiple acknowledgments on social media this recent Doctors’ Day. Although it is nice to be recognized, are we just supposed to forget the recent hostility and disrespect? Can we ever really thank those o…
Losing my first patient
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…
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…
