Medical

It’s 8 p.m., and I stumble into my apartment and fall into bed. Somehow, I avoided nodding off in the car driving home. I just finished a 36-hour shift, something I thought was an inhumane task. Somehow, I survived on two hours of sleep, incessant phone calls, pages, and a granola bar. This morning I…

E-cigarettes (vapes) first made headlines due to skyrocketing sales and popularity. Then reports of serious illnesses and deaths related to vaping tobacco and other substances began mounting in summer 2019. By mid-February 2020, the CDC reported more than 2,800 cases of lung injuries requiring hospitalization across all 50 states, and 68 deaths. EVALI, as this…

In between snippets of conversation exchanged with my husband about how the first day of remote learning went for our 9 year old and whether the latest nanny was likely to quit given health risks associated with working in a two-physician frontline worker household in the context of COVID-19, we also discuss some potentially dangerous…

As the medical director of a Midwest community emergency department that has yet to see the New York City-levels of devastation, I am begging hospital administrators across the country to begin leading their front line health care workers in preparation to meet the enemy head-on. It has become painfully clear in our hospital daily incident…

Growing evidence suggests that the novel COVID-19 virus can be aerosolized.  To adequately protect employees, providers require not just “droplet,” but “airborne” precautions and the appropriate healthcare worker personal protective equipment (PPE). Appropriate PPE mandates an N95 mask. News reports for weeks have described hospitals working without the necessary protection for health care providers. This…

I’ve been reading a lot of posts expressing disappointment with the way that COVID-19 has been covered in the media and worry about the economic consequences of prolonged social distancing. This is long, and you might not care, but here’s my perspective as a former ICU nurse that witnessed many deaths, a nurse anesthetist who…

“It’s a strange time to be having a baby,” my patient said as she sat alone in her labor room. The state order to shelter-in-place in California had left her family with few options as her husband had to stay home to take care of their toddler. She is one of many pregnant women who…

Based on reports from China, we know that most COVID-19 patients (about 80%) will develop mild flulike symptoms, including fever, dry cough, and body aches that can be managed at home. 20% will develop more serious symptoms, such as pneumonia requiring hospitalization, with about a quarter of these requiring ICU-level care. Initial reports focused on…

Social distancing. It is a mantra that seemed to have been plucked straight out of obscurity for those who had never heard of it before just as the coronavirus pandemic dug its ugly claws into the fabric of American life. And since then, it has been perfusing our cultural ether for the last several weeks—aggressively…