Hospital at Home
Mr. Smith was a sixty-eight year old man who came to the Veterans Affairs hospital where I was a medical student complaining of chest pain. “With chest pain, it’s all about the story,” my resident, the physician in charge of our team, said. We talked to him to find out what he was doing when … Continue reading
Ebola
“If I get a call about smallpox from the ER I’m not coming in,” an Infectious Disease doctor said to a colleague in the hospital where I was working. It was the early days of 9/11 and anything seemed possible. “Are you all OK with providing care for Ebola patients?” our section chief asked. Our ICU is the … Continue reading
Code
“They need you in room 13” she said when I answered the phone and I ran back to the ICU. The patient was coding and for each minute that felt like an hour, we tried, and failed, to save her. She wasn’t breathing, her heart wasn’t working, and despite the 30 people gathered in the room, … Continue reading
Time to bring back morbidity and mortality conferences
My post on the changing culture of medicine as reflected in the way we talk about our errors in M&Ms is up at kevinMD. http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2014/07/time-bring-back-morbidity-mortality-conferences.html
Morbidity & Mortality Conference, a post mortem
When things go wrong in medicine, as they invariably do, we try to figure out what went wrong, and why. We try to learn if there’s anything we could have done better and what we should do next time. It used to be, in the days of the Giants, that the physician responsible for the patient … Continue reading
My post on Bronchial Thermoplasty is up on KevinMD today
My post on Bronchial Thermoplasty, a new treatment for asthma, and evidence in medicine is up at KevinMD.com today. http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2014/04/bronchial-thermoplasty-asthma-widely.html
A New Therapy for Asthma
I first met Carol* (name and identifying details have been changed) when she came to my clinic after a severe asthma attack had sent her to the Intensive Care Unit. After a few days, she had been extubated and had acquired a new diagnosis, asthma. When she saw me in clinic, she felt better than … Continue reading
The Best Rejections
“You have gotten the best rejections this week,” my friend says. True that. Editor 1 not only wrote back, but thanked me for submitting and said my piece is “very well written,” but, alas it was “not quite right.” Editor 1 then suggested another major outlet for which it would be a “good match.” [Said … Continue reading
“Are you getting your period?”
“I get annoyed with [my husband] when I overreact to something and he retorts: ‘are you getting your period?’” my friend says. Just imagine what it would be like if we treated men the same way. “You’re only mad because you have blood dripping from your penis. Not because of what I did.” “You always … Continue reading
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