I’m writing a book, and as such, I’ve been combing through the archives. I just re-read my very first blog post ever, and realized it was from almost exactly twelve years ago. It’s a sweet little piece, full of details that I wouldn’t have remembered …
I’m surrounded. Our kitchen table is strewn with piles of my old journals, many years’ worth of writing workshop printouts, and copies of every academic literary magazine that ever published my stuff. It’s a lot of my old writing, including some fairly well-developed stories and …
“Sometimes, late at night, you can still hear the moans of the poor souls who died tortured deaths in the old ICU…” Dr. Gabaldi was a well-liked teaching attending who enjoyed entertaining us with his ghost stories. It wasn’t hard to come up with a …
It was a sunny spring day in 1995, and my spirit was about to be crushed. He was our college health careers advisor, a doctor who didn’t go by ‘Doctor’. Rather, he was ‘Dean’, as in Dean of the Pre-Meds. His office was in one …
It’s Christmas Eve 2021, and our COVID numbers are nasty: This is happening all over the country. It’s another surge, worse than the last few surges, and healthcare workers operating on the front lines are beyond tired. They’re exhausted, and my heart goes out to …
Originally published in April 2011, this practical post featuring a real patient encounter that took place in our clinic bathroom (and the scientific questions raised by that whole humorous situation) has been viewed many thousands of times.* In the ten years since, the evidence and …
“Mom, every time I look in the mirror, I see something different. Sometimes it’s good and I feel good about myself, but, sometimes it’s not.” It was well after dinner, and my nine-year-old daughter was perched on the kitchen counter nibbling on apple slices while …
It’s a gorgeous spring day in May. Trees are flowering, flowers are flowering, and I can’t go a day without antihistamines. I suffer from springtime pollen allergies and asthma, common things that can cause congestion and a cough. This has been anxiety-provoking for me at …
So, here I am in the office, which all but closed in mid-March. While we do have a skeleton crew on site seeing non-COVID-19 urgent care (like abrasions and UTI’s and joint pain), most our ongoing outpatient work is via telehealth. I’m going to talk …
I was “activated” to duty on the inpatient COVID surge teams last week. I was worried, not only because it’s been a decade since I’ve been in charge of an inpatient service, but more so because SARS-CoV-2 is a new virus, and COVID19* is a …