personal analyses of medicine, violence, faith
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Why?
What is your why? Following a recent conference on academic hospitalist medicine, I have spent a lot of time these past few weeks with learners – medical students, residents, pre-med college students – as well as community researchers who have survived various forms of gun violence. It’s no secret to anyone that I was quite…
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A Letter to My Children
To my children, I don’t remember much of being your age and so now I am wondering what your earliest memories of me will be. You have already begun to divide time into a world before and after the virus; will you remember your father the same way? What do you wish I had told…
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Two years
I was recently shopping in the local grocery store and overheard: “Look on the bright side, we don’t have to wear masks any more!” I was wearing one and almost stopped walking to mull over that comment. Two years prior, I stood in the exact same grocery store and overheard a different sort of conversation:…
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Crisis
“Is THIS a crisis?” I find myself asking this question everyday, ever since the hospital said it was so. Was it a crisis when she died last week? Or was it last month? We thought we brought her back but it didn’t work, not for long, and I can still hear her husband crying when…
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Action at a Distance
By an unfortunate artifact of scheduling, I worked 18 shifts in the last 22 days. Not all my patients had Covid but quite a few did. And in trying to think about what to write here, I am realizing that there is simply nothing left to say. It is like the quintessential experience of hospital…
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Shaken
I went to pick up a disposable blue gown today as I have countless times this week, month, year, decade. In doing such a mindless and ordinary task, this time for “ordinary” diseases, I was suddenly hit by a series of flashbacks: delicately laying masks on a single paper towel, triple checking my gown ties…