Category: Hospital-Based Medicine

The Apgar Olympics: The race is on

The page comes during a lull on an otherwise busy day in the well-baby nursery (WBN). My pager’s shrill cry rouses me like the blast of a starting pistol. DI-DI GESTATION. 37 WEEKS. BABY A WITH NON-REASSURING HEART TONES. BABY B BREECH. OPERATING ROOM …

Heal the system: Medicine must be anti-racist

My maternal grandmother, Susana, was one of the most important women in my life. I was named after her. At least, that is what I thought for many years. I had gone by my grandmother’s name until I transferred high schools in the suburbs of Chicag…

Clinicians need fire pit time

The flames flicker, tantalizingly reaching upward, and I sit mesmerized. How many times have I sat by my backyard fire pit and watched this ageless dance? I think; I meditate; I pray. A cigar and bourbon often accompany me. I especially love to stand b…

Exclusion of BIPOC from VIP floors in an academic medical center

Omar Mirza is a psychiatrist and comic creator. In this comic, he discusses how Black, indigenous, and other people of color are excluded from VIP floors at an academic medical center (click to enlarge): Omar Mirza is a psychiatrist. Image credit: Omar…

A morning code blue for a COVID patient

An excerpt from An Eschatological Isolation. At 12:11 p.m., the overhead speaker announced: “Code Blue, Three West.” She repeated, “Code Blue, Three West.” Shit. I started my stopwatch and saved the patient note I was writing in the back office of Thre…

Physicians: Stop dreading call

Even though I completed residency almost 15 years ago, it is easy to remember the dread I experienced before taking hospital call. The sinking feeling in my stomach as the call date loomed near, the hypervigilance and terror every time my beeper went o…

Reflections from a former intern

July 1 is a day that marks the new era when student truly becomes doctor, where hundreds of residency programs start day one of the three-year or longer residency, a life-changing rite of passage. Where the initial hours start the tens of thousands of …

COVID in Pakistan: a physician’s story [PODCAST]

“The right choice of words, at the right time, can lift a person out of despair and literally save a person’s life, while an ill-chosen word, or worse, a purposely harsh one, can scar a person. The entire field of narrative medicine is formed aro…

A Black physician’s exhortation to new Black interns

There are some things I wanted to say to you as you officially commence your training that I wish I had been told.  Take your training with you.  Take the love and support of your family with you.  Take the ancestors—their prayers, their struggles, the…

Questions of a canceled whistle-blower

This is not a story about the before.  It is about the after. When I blew the whistle on the gender harassment I experienced and witnessed within my workplace, I naively thought doing so would help. I thought opportunities and experiences for women wou…