Medical

I have been searching for something all of my life. Some would call it happiness; others call it success. No matter what I achieve, the goalposts seem to keep moving. Perhaps this sounds familiar. Maybe you realize that it is all an endless chase. Maybe you are tired of: not being completely at peace being…

In the COVID-19 environment, wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) is the norm for clinicians. Monthly, U.S. health care workers use 89 million masks. While these masks help prevent the spread of disease, PPE creates barriers to effective communication that is requiring clinicians to learn new techniques for interacting with patients. Learning new verbal and non-verbal…

The cardiologist was called STAT to the ED for a 50-year-old man with an acute STEMI. The man arrested eight times in the ED, each time successfully resuscitated. He finally stabilized to where he could be moved to the cardiac cath lab. The cardiologist quickly met with the wife and told her the plans and…

Sometimes I think. Sometimes I think and nothing happens. That seems to happen a lot during this period of the second wave of COVID-19 that has hit my hospital. Netcare Kingsway Hospital is a community private hospital and has been overwhelmed in caring for patients with COVID-19. Sometimes I think and something happens. That’s when…

A backlog is a terrible thing, isn’t it? It’s certainly something that we often choose to hide as physicians. We use it as a source of shame, guilt, frustration, and overwhelm. Many physicians have had their jobs threatened, or even lost their jobs, due to mountains of unfinished charts or inboxes. When you understand this,…

“As the mother of a child born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, besides going through four open-heart surgeries and coding, my son has also had eight abdominal surgeries, including a Ladd’s procedure and resection of his colon. William also functions without his appendix, spleen, and gall bladder. In addition to every kind of therapy imaginable,…

This topic always takes me back.  To the time my life stopped and flipped upside down.  I never understood how people could drop to their knees in public and have a moment of agony or grief.  I guess the pain I had felt up to that moment was not strong enough to knock me to…

Recent events in our mid-west region prompted us to bring the topic of physician suicide forward with our residents and fellows. They received this information in a weekly mindfulness email they receive as part of our internal coaching program: Losing a colleague or friend to suicide is a tragedy to those who survive and it…