Medical

Those were the headlines in one of the Sunday papers. He was around fifty years old and with his wife. They stood in front of me in the supermarket. He was in shorts and a light blue t-shirt, wearing beach flip-flops. Standard casual wear for the holiday beach town where I work at Netcare Kingsway…

I was an assistant nurse manager (ANM) in a 24 bed ICU in my younger, energetic years. Before that, I was a manager in a very small emergency department. I must say, I loved it. I loved the thrill and the challenge. I was able to work with the Joint Commission; I ordered EKG monitors…

As I watched the vaccine rollout take place over the past month, all I can say is that I am not surprised. I watched hospital executives who never see patients jump the line, doctors having their healthy nannies vaccinated, and health systems trusted with vaccine doses have essentially no plan. It’s like we didn’t have…

“It has been over a month since I started this new hobby. I told my middle-school-aged daughter tonight, ‘I am going to write a post about how ocean plastic picking has made me a better pediatrician.’ She replied, ‘You mean better than other pediatricians?’ ‘No, I mean a better pediatrician than I was before,’ I…

It was Friday night, and after a long day of grossing, I was ready to leave the hospital when the department’s door opened, and the nurse shouted, “we have a frozen for an emergency liver transplant.” Without hesitation, I took the specimen and called the attending on call. After a few minutes, the surgeon arrived…

My first clinical rotation as a third-year medical student was in orthopedics. I remember the excitement of being scrubbed into the OR, with the gloried task of suctioning while the fellows did the real work. About 30 minutes into the surgery, when things were getting underway, a male physician scrubbed in and took the tool…

It is stressful enough to live with heart disease. Now, with a global pandemic, access to health care providers has shifted from in-office to telemedicine in many instances. There are challenges for patients with heart disease in this context: Patients are often older and are not familiar with using technology for videoconferencing (Zoom, Doximity, FaceTime,…

This week at work, I had a patient in the hospital who had been through a pretty challenging illness, and he was going to have to be discharged to a skilled nursing facility (SNF) to rehab for a few weeks. Sadly, SNFs in my area do not currently allow any visitors due to the pandemic.…

Developing the COVID-19 vaccine was the first monumental milestone on a long and arduous journey to achieving the entire U.S. population’s vaccination. One of the barriers to achieving this task is the absence of a reliable, scalable way to uniquely identify each individual before or after they receive the vaccine. Furthermore, in the absence of…