About one in fifty people reading this essay will be diagnosed with kidney cancer at some time in their life. In fact, one out of one people writing this essay has already been diagnosed with kidney cancer. (I had a small tumor removed from my left kid…
Category: Nephrology
Medicine is a calling and being on call is medicine
Late one Friday night while walking the long and lonely hallways of my hospital, my mind wandered back several years. I recalled my first weekend call as an eager, newly minted nephrology attending. I had met one of my colleagues earlier that morning in the doctors’ lounge, whereupon I had been handed a clunky, black […]
It’s the physician’s job to think of worst-case scenarios
I saw two patients with a chief complaint of bubbles in their urine this month. One middle-aged woman had eaten some wild mushrooms she was pretty sure she had identified correctly, but once her urine turned bubbly a few days later, she came in to make sure her kidneys were OK. Even though she was […]
MKSAP: 25-year-old man with dark-colored urine
Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians. A 25-year-old man is evaluated for dark-colored urine for 2 days, swelling of the face and hands for 1 day, and severe headaches this morning. He reports having an upper respiratory tract infection 1 week ago with fever, sore throat, and […]