A few months ago, I was on call and admitted a 65-year-old man to the intensive care unit for a flare of his chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Although he had only gotten to the point of being unable to speak full sentences between gasps for breath for only a few days, his story started […]
I was a second-year resident, doing a 24-hour shift on maternity care. I’d spent some arduous nights on call with my attending physician, Dr. Campbell. Now, we sat at the nursing station, joking about what this one might bring. “You must be a black cloud,” she teased, accusing me of being one of those unfortunate […]
The most high-powered rotation in my medical school was endocrinology. There, you got to see things most doctors never come close to diagnosing themselves. Uppsala University’s Akademiska Hospital served as a referral center for the Swedish population north of Uppsala, an area the size and shape of California. Back in the seventies, laboratory testing wasn’t […]
As Hannah’s granddaughter clutched at her skeletal fingers, the blanket fell to the side revealing the faded serial numbers on her forearm. The family gathered, yet again, to say goodbye. This time her acrid breath had lost humidity, her respirations dry and raspy, the extremities mottled with a bluish tinge. Death had visited the neighborhood […]
I sometimes get messages from people who have lost physician colleagues and loved ones to suicide. It’s the specifics of these stories that wound me: a note left for an unexpected person; an insignificant fight at sign-out that in retrospect is full of meaning; the white coat that a woman wore when she jumped to […]
A speech to graduating residents. It’s an easy thing to count the number of seeds in an apple. In our residency class of 2018 we have nine seeds, and on your graduation, we scatter you across the country. You each carry amazing potential that we have hopefully helped nurture over your years here. You will […]
There are 168 hours in a week and 8,736 hours in a year. There are 10,080 minutes in a week, and 524,160 minutes in a year. Residents and fellows working in an academic environment often work close to, if not in large part, more than 80 hours a week, or 4,160 hours a year. They […]
One of the great myths amongst residents is that once they become attendings, they’ll have so much more free time. I’ll never work this much again, they think. This is the most time-intensive phase of life, and everything after residency is easy in comparison. Unfortunately, they are usually wrong. Statistically, working about the same number […]
An excerpt from The Choice: Medicine vs. Nursing. An extensive amount of data now exists in the science of choice. Social researchers such as David Kahneman and Dan Ariely have conducted numerous experiments which suggest a number of ways in which humans are led astray when making choices. An understanding some of these pitfalls is critical […]
How do I balance my home life with physician life? I really want to do a research study. How do I start? How do I get involved in my specialties society? I am overwhelmed with clinical duties. How do I negotiate for nonclinical time? My manuscript was rejected. What should I do next? I had […]
