It was a cold day in Durban. Sixteen degrees Celsius is cold for us on the East Coast of sub-tropical Africa. I had made a trip through the suburbs to drop something off for my theatre scrub sister. The roadblocks are manned by community commandos, mo…
“We believe optimal postoperative pain management should provide adequate pain relief, minimize adverse effects, and reduce chances of drug misuse. While we cannot undertreat pain, we also cannot go back to the practice of over-prescribing or unn…
It took about ten minutes of carefully shifting the controls on the hospital bed, placing pillows in the right spaces to prop me up to angle that resembles “sitting”—all done delicately so as to not increase the pain level I was already in….
How is your ego serving you? Medicine is a hierarchical entity. More so in surgery. There is a linear line of command from the chief to the junior to the intern to the med student to the aspiring med student. “Shit rolls downhill,” we said …
Due to COVID-19, hospitals were forced to reevaluate and rework systems and processes that had been around for decades. From managing the increasing demands for testing and treating patients with the coronavirus to acquiring necessary medical equipment…
“Continuing to do this work the way I was doing it was not sustainable. I needed to get off the merry-go-round. I just didn’t know how. I didn’t think I could stop myself—transplant was my duty, my responsibility, and what I was trained and progr…
The surgeon becomes the surgical patient. That was my summary thought after discussing my vision problem with my former partner, an ophthalmologist well versed in treating cataracts. Despite having performed eye surgery on thousands of patients in the …
“There were many things to be processed about that event. It happened within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, its disproportional effects on the African American community, and a few days after the murder of George Floyd, an African American…
Despite reading numerous books tailored to the non-physicist, my rudimentary understanding of quantum physics suggests that quantum particles exist in numerous synchronous states and numerous synchronous positions and are only truly defined upon the ob…
I began this journey in 2010. It began as a fresh-smelling breeze after a year and a half of anxiety, depression, and uncertainty. I did not think I would be a surgeon. I thought maybe family medicine, psychiatry — at worst, I would like gynecolo…
