Local Doc on the Block
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Compassion vs…
2–4 minutes560 wordsRead more: Compassion vs…What is the antithesis of compassion? We imagine it to be apathy but more truly it is competition…
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Fear
6–9 minutes1,367 wordsRead more: Fear“What am I afraid of?” I have been thinking about this question for awhile and must admit that for a very long time whenever I started to write something I froze. (I started writing this in August 2021.) Like many, I had been experiencing panic attacks/spells of anxiety with variable frequency. Sometimes the trigger is obvious and I know exactly why I am feeling the chest tightness, the racing heartbeat, and what seems to my mind’s eye a vast and impenetrable wall of blinding dread. But sometimes it seizes me unexpectedly and leaves me gripping the kitchen countertop, staring at…
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Why?
1–2 minutes257 wordsRead more: 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 severely burned out by twin epidemics these past few years, so I had serious hesitations on promoting the profession of medicine when speaking to a classroom full of aspiring pre-medical students. I told them that one essential characteristic of medicine is curiosity: the relentless pursuit…
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A Letter to My Children
2–3 minutes479 wordsRead more: A Letter to My ChildrenTo 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 you that was both simple and important enough to overcome the sharp smell of hand sanitizer, the fear of masks you had from Halloweens long before the long nightmare, the forgotten names of friends you had just learned to make?
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Two years
6–9 minutes1,423 wordsRead more: Two yearsI 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: “This virus is all about the hype and a way for the media and drug companies to make money. Remember H1N1, SARS, Zika, bird flu? Ain’t nothing going to come of it.” Two years. My oh my how grocery store small talk has changed.
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Crisis
1–2 minutes277 wordsRead more: 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 I remember. Is losing that leg a crisis? Or going blind in that eye? I know getting laid off is one, even worse for being too sick and too unprofitable to be cared for, like being homeless or addict or shot. Isn’t every day in…
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Action at a Distance
2–3 minutes403 wordsRead more: Action at a DistanceBy 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 healthcare: watching someone die. There is a moment in which you watch someone die, sometimes horrifically, and you are shaken. If you are lucky, you find a way tell yourself that it was something rare or unusual or to be blamed on “poor lifestyle choices”…
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Shaken
3–4 minutes678 wordsRead more: ShakenI 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 and face shield before entering a room, standing watch outside patient rooms to coach staff in donning and doffing… I froze in place for a few seconds and felt my pulse race. A few seconds of deep breathing and of anticipating the chest tightness… and…