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…
We as physicians need a dose of our own medicine as a booster ever so often. I went in for a simple procedure. A lumbar epidural steroid injection for pain which has recently become more than tolerable at times — nothing disabling. Nothing that stops m…
About halfway through the internal medicine residency, there comes a time when a resident must decide on what he or she plans to do after three years of training. We may come across a second-year resident saying: What should I do next? Should I become …
I would like to offer some words of encouragement to what many call the “non-traditional” students pursuing medicine. The term encompasses people in different aspects in their lives. It may be someone in a different line of work looking at medicine as …
My local hospital in an affluent suburb of New York City displays its Outstanding Patient Experience Award 2018 and Magnet Recognized status on its website. My experiences tell a different story. This hospital is located approximately five to seven min…
1. Very little revolves around the patient. For a place dedicated to healing, the hospital does a poor job accommodating patients. Labs are drawn in the middle of the night, so the doctor has them early in the morning. There is no standard rounding tim…
