Before I could see her, I could hear her. My patient, a young woman with messy braided hair, was grunting with every effort to breathe. The noises quieted slightly when I reached her bedside, but her tears continued to fall between gasps. Her body move…
It’s Monday morning, and I’m the attending physician starting a week of inpatient service in the hospital. On my patient list is a man named Earl, age ninety-one. He’s outlived his siblings, his first and second wives and all of his p…
As a hospitalist, like most in health care, I am afflicted by the slow march of thousands of mouse clicks on the electronic health record (EHR) every day I work. But after starting a new job and learning a new EHR, I have become painfully aware of the…
When you enter the doors of an emergency department, what you are entering is the realm of the unknown. Needles, blood, blaring alarms and all-nighters with nurses are about to become your new norm. For your whole life, you thought good food, sleep, an…
Stepping into a hospital for the first time as a clinical medical student is a strange dichotomy. There is still so much you have to learn before you will become a physician, but you are quickly thrust into life-and-death situations. One of my early ro…
Part 3 of a series. Patients with advanced cancer are particularly vulnerable to infection due to a compromised immune system. Moreover, the typical symptoms of serious infection, such as fever and chills, may be absent in cancer patients. If not ident…
I entered residency self-assured, if not in my scholarly achievements, at least in who I am as a person. I left slightly broken. Something happens to you in residency, and you don’t realize the transformation as it occurs. It may be the loss of a patie…
Pain usually cannot be “treated” like a standard ear infection. Treating patients in pain requires setting realistic expectations, using a variety of approaches, and patience. One patient I treated months ago highlights these points. At 6 a.m., I was r…
“For the rest of my life, I’ll never see her again or smell the scent of her unwashed hair. I’ll never hug her soft squishy hips or sigh when she tells me to stop sleeping, get up, and enjoy the day.” This runs through my head before I start sobbing in…
During rounds, in between seeing patients, the medical student pulls out his phone and scans a dating app for new matches. In the team room, a resident opens Facebook before responding to a non-urgent page. Each of these instances may seem trivial enou…
