I had been searching for a year. Because of the pandemic, despite the pandemic and to heal from the pandemic. Finally in May this year, I was gifted what seemed to have become an impossible task. I messaged the hospital manager: “The trees have arrived…
“This plea for help is on behalf of every hospital worker who has been on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic — from the environmental services staff and medical assistants who are often not recognized, to the social workers and chaplains wh…
What a year of change. A pandemic. Cancer. Death. Loss. Fighting. Abandonment. Pain. Becoming an orphan. Becoming a caregiver. My family was hit with a sledgehammer and crushed into pieces. My joyful plans and decades of hard work wiped away with the i…
“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…
Listen to psychiatrist Emily Watters’ work with the homeless population and how she got her start writing cartoons, educating patients using out-of-the-box communication strategies. Emily Watters is a psychiatrist and can be reached at The Cartoo…
“As a species, we have been an abject failure in dealing with a worldwide crisis. We politicize things for money, political reasons and some kind of weird power, even when it kills us in the process. We already have a World Health Organization (W…
The current era of health care delivery has been aptly compared with going to war against an invisible enemy that can attack anywhere, at any time and with novel means. This invisible enemy was attacking the civilians as well as the “front line&#…
The following is a transcription of Dr. Deshpande’s spoken story. What is wrong with me? I’ve been doing this for 25 years. Why am I so scared now? That’s what I’m thinking as I drive to the hospital during the early part of the pandemic, March, …
The desire for human connection is so irrevocably and putatively a tenet of the human condition. The relationships we form with one another are quintessential in adding value to our lives and in fostering loving bonds. And the way we express this conne…
When Elvis Presley rolled up his sleeve and received the polio vaccine backstage at The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956, most Americans knew about it. At the time, the only stars hotter than rock ‘n’ roll itself were Presley, the genre’s de facto king, and Su…
