One night, a woman I’ll call Tonya got a compliment from a guy when she was out with her boyfriend. Tonya’s boyfriend cursed her because another man had complimented her. He said: “You give it to everybody, I want it too.” In anticipation of his physic…
The pain radiated from the top of Annette Monachelli’s head, and it got worse when she changed positions. It didn’t feel like her usual migraine. The 47-year-old Vermont attorney turned innkeeper visited her local doctor at the Stowe Family Practice tw…
“I would submit to you that those (small hospital nurses) probably do get breaks. They probably play cards for a considerable amount of the day.” – Maureen Walsh For the first ten years of my professional life, I was an inpatient nurse, first on …
Like more than half of older men, I take a cholesterol-lowering medication called a statin. Sometimes that seems a bit strange, because I don’t have high cholesterol. My doctor prescribed it based on a formula that largely hinges on age and sex. I’m 71…
I think the time has come for us all to do a little more than put our 2 cents in. Our health care system is a mess, and while many of us fighting in the trenches and taking care of patients are working to make things better (despite the best efforts of…
I am a nocturnist (a nocturnal hospitalist). I love my job, but many nights my work can seem unfulfilling. For one, taking care of hospitalized adult patients is primarily spent managing exacerbations of chronic diseases. Therefore, the reality is that…
To reach my current position as a general cardiologist, I have taken nine board exams. I have also been teaching medical students for over ten years with several colleagues who write questions for the USMLE Step 1 exam. Through this experience, I have …
These events happened over 18 years ago. Some content has been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty. Searching for positive changes in the health care industry. We are not a number, and the patients are not a number. I’m not good at lying. My…
When I was five years old, I wanted to be Aurora from Sleeping Beauty. I admired her because I, too, had long, blonde hair and loved to play in the woods. During the movie, I sang with the music. “I know you. I walked with you once upon a dream. I know…
Within the clinics, hospital corridors, and halls of medicine, a new phrase has emerged and taken hold of the practice of medicine. Whenever confronted with the challenging, inconvenient, undesirable, underinsured or maybe when just overwhelmed, health…
