I remember visiting my pediatrician as a child, and even at a young age I was in awe of his degrees hanging on the wall. Looking back, I think I may have looked like the kid in Norman Rockwell’s Doctor with my behind in the air waiting to get a vaccination while staring in fascination […]
I can vividly remember my first day as a real doctor. I started on the pediatric pulmonology service, and recall spending what felt like an hour, deliberating whether I could order Tylenol for my patient. Would it interact with the Pulmozyme treatment? Fortunately, I had very patient senior resident who calmed my nerves and was […]
We bear the pain in different ways. For me, it feels like you’re a combat medic and you’ve used up all your tourniquets on a wounded soldier that seems to hemorrhaging from everywhere. The blood seeps through the skin, and no matter what you do you cannot stop the soldier from choking to death on […]
I come by many things in my life naturally — my stubbornness, my red hair, and my career. I am very fortunate. Unlike many I am the daughter of a female emergency physician. This is something I never really considered while growing up. Yes, my mom was a doctor. Did she save lives? I guess […]
Physicians on the front lines of health care today are sometimes described as going to battle. It’s an apt metaphor. Physicians, like combat soldiers, often face a profound and unrecognized threat to their well-being: moral injury. Moral injury is frequently mischaracterized. In combat veterans it is diagnosed as post-traumatic stress; among physicians it’s portrayed as […]
As we all know, the time around discharge from the hospital is a tricky one. In more ways than one can imagine, patients are in a delicate state, judged by those caring for them to no longer be sick enough to need to remain in the hospital, but possibly not quite completely ready to be […]
Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians. A 38-year-old woman is evaluated in follow-up after recent surgery for endometrial cancer. Her family history is significant for colon cancer in her sister (diagnosed at age 45 years) and her mother (diagnosed at age 65 years). Her maternal grandfather was […]
When I left clinical practice, I thought I was prepared for the change in my identity. Wrong. I was shocked by the degree to which my sense of myself and my value in the world were rocked by leaving the profession. After all, I left practice less than seven years after I could legally write […]
This is based on a true story. The name and some details of the events have been changed. She was the smarter nurse who floated to ICU, to CVRU, to CCU. She could handle any crisis: balloon pumps, CRRT, open-heart patients, respiratory distress, code blues — anything. Sandy was quiet. She didn’t really have any […]
Education can be expensive. Higher education can be even more costly. Even partial scholarships can be deceptive as one might opt for a more expensive school for the sake of redeeming “free money.” As a student, I had no financial understanding of return on investment when I was considering higher education. All in, I plowed […]
