I received so many messages from my last post, and I figured it would be useful to perhaps answer some of them for all to see. Is it safe to see family over Thanksgiving? Yes. If you live with them. That’s it. The only potentially safe alternative is r…
Have you ever walked into a hospital before shift change in the early morning hours? The lights are dimmer, there is scarce staff walking to their floors, and people are counting the minutes until the new staff comes. Most staff exist in this surviva…
“As you know, his condition has been worsening dramatically over the past week. He is unable to breathe without the non-rebreather since last night. Today may be a good time for a goodbye visit.” I told the family of my COVID-19 positive patient who wa…
February 24, 1991, and I wait. I wait on the edge of my cot under the pitched canopy of my far-away canvas home; its sides pulsating from the ever-present wind; sand somehow traversing the walls, everything inside airbrushed a pastel tan; outside the s…
As cases of COVID-19 sore around the nation, the days of New York as the epicenter of the pandemic have become a distant memory for this emergency room doctor. Did the government really once send us refrigerated trucks for our dead and a naval ship for…
On November 9th, the governor of North Dakota, Doug Burgum, decided to allow hospital workers with COVID-19 to continue to come to work. He required that they be asymptomatic and that they only work on COVID-19 wards with COVID-19 patients. Given at-ca…
“While there is a myriad of expert opinions on what long term effects this pandemic will have on our children and their physical and mental health, we must also remember the age-old idiom: this too shall pass. We must also be sensitive to not add…
I rarely post more than pictures on Facebook. In fact, I rarely use Facebook for much of anything anymore. But I need you all to just listen for a second. I’m scared. For you and for me. I need you all to take a minute and think of the last time …
This question resonates in my mind each day I pass through the prison gatehouse. The gatehouse is a physical barrier and a mental one, separating the outside from the inside, seceding the lives of people who guard and care for inmates from the lives o…
The Prussian pathologist, Rudolf Virchow, who gave us Virchow’s triad: hypercoagulability, endothelial injury, blood flow stasis also gave us the foundations of social medicine, claiming that “physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor” and shoul…
