“You will be asleep for your surgery,” anesthesiologists often reassure their patients. Just before the start of anesthesia, a patient may hear the nurse saying, “Think of a nice dream as you go off to sleep.” While these statements are intended to soo…
While we’re not there yet, we may be approaching a point where we’re facing a significant skills shortage among surgeons. A 2017 study by Meritt Hawkins found that 52 percent of orthopedic surgeons were 55 and older, as were 48 percent of general surge…
This week sees myself in the office only for a few hours. I decided to drive across the city yesterday to meet with supportive friends for lunch. All three of us are fully vaccinated. Along the way in the suburbs, there were still people parked at stra…
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 …
