Stories Archives - Page 24 of 58

Living-Room Code

It was a cold Friday morning, and my day started slow. I was a third-year emergency-medicine resident in West Philadelphia and was doing my EMS rotation.

I rode with the EMS lieutenant, who told me, “My job is to assist the medics with the bad stuff.” This, he explained, usually meant codes (cardiac arrests) and fires.

Then we got the first call and zipped through the city, lights and sirens blaring.

Detachedly, I wondered what type of cardiac arrest awaited us. When we walked into the apartment building and saw a twenty-three-year-old woman in the doorway, her face distraught and fearful, I knew.

The apartment was warm, well furnished and cozy. Firemen, who’d arrived on the scene first, knelt on the blue-carpeted floor to perform CPR on the young man lying there, as the medics tried to put in an IV.

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The Last Pandemic

14 Comments / Stories / Tony Dajer

7:00 on a Sunday evening.

It is day 30+ of New York City’s COVID-19 pandemic. Fire trucks and flashing lights fill the street fronting the hospital emergency department where I’m a physician. The scene erupts into applause and sirens. We doctors, nurses, physician assistants, techs, housekeepers and clerks wave back and flash our individual cardboard letters spelling “Thank You!” It is so good to be outside and, for a few minutes, unafraid. Inside, our ER break room overflows with donated pizzas and pastries. Later we will take cartloads of these up to the jam-packed ICU and medicine floors.

The virus has the world by the throat, and New York City is the epicenter. None of us has ever seen this much death. But all hearts are beating together.

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An Ounce of Empathy

14 Comments / Stories / William Liakos

I am a medical student in my third year of studies. For medical students, this is the point at which, after two years of book learning, we rotate through hospital clerkships that give us our first experience of delivering hands-on care to inpatients.

Earlier in the year (it feels like many lifetimes ago), I read that COVID-19 was “just the flu.” We heard from scientific sources and popular media that other maladies were much worse, and that it would be a mistake to overreact to this one. Like many people, I accepted these assurances without too much concern. It all seemed a bit remote to me–the way I imagine issues like food stamps may seem to a politician who’s never needed them.

But now all of that has changed for me.

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Sweet Child of Mine

6 Comments / Stories / Jenn OConnor

You know what stress is, right? You’re late for work, your car won’t start, gas costs more than you expected. We’ve all been there, and it’s not pleasant, that palm-sweating, heart-racing anxiety. Luckily, it’s not long-lasting–not toxic.

What is toxic stress? It’s prolonged adversity and/or abuse–not having enough to eat, or being exposed to violence. It’s the kind of stress that puts you on edge and keeps you there, day after day after day.

If you’re familiar with one CDC study from the 1990s, you know that factors such as divorce, domestic violence or having an incarcerated parent are called Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). Four or more ACEs can result in chronic health conditions such as heart disease or diabetes. In the long term, living with ACEs or other negative factors, such as poverty, can literally change your brain chemistry.

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Unmute

10 Comments / Stories / Amy Cowan

His name announces itself as a banner across my ringing phone. We share the same last name.

I hit Mute, buying time while I do the math: Answer his call now and stave off three missed calls and two long-winded voicemails, with him clearing his throat in the background; or take the call, along with God knows what kinds of trauma he’ll inflict on me. I have avoided calling him lately. Subconsciously, I know this call won’t end well.

I hit Unmute and immediately realize that my math was wrong: I’m too late.

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Vision Quest

6 Comments / Stories / Alex Altman

After finishing my third-year clinical rotations in medical school, I was feeling sleep-deprived and stressed out. The problem, I finally realized, was the ridiculous amount of pressure I’d put on myself to impress my attending physicians and get good grades.

My father is an ophthalmologist and cornea/cataract specialist. After routinely rejecting his career advice throughout my undergraduate years, I’d entered medical school–and, to my father’s delight, found myself increasingly fascinated by his field.

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A COVID State of Mind

10 Comments / Stories / Ibrahim Sablaban

I’m a fourth-year psychiatry resident in the final months of training, and I have signed on to continue as an attending physician at my hospital.

In mid-March, my team was consulted on a patient in the ICU. She was one of the first identified COVID-19 cases in Michigan, and our hospital’s first such patient.

The patient was being treated with psychotropic medications, and one of them was decreasing the effectiveness of an antiviral drug she’d been prescribed for COVID-19. Her caregivers asked us to suggest a different psychiatric drug that wouldn’t have this effect.

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Love in the Time of COVID-19

11 Comments / Stories / Sarah Stumbar

COVID-19 changes everything–even, or especially, love. It demands that we love differently, and in new ways. For me, this is what #loveinthetimeofcovid19 looks like.

My husband, Lunan, and I are both doctors. Lunan, a urologist, is completing his final year of training in New York City, and I am a family-physician educator at a medical school in Miami.

We are living separately this year–one of the many sacrifices we’ve made in pursuing our medical training over the past twelve years. Since August, he and I been traveling back and forth to see each other two or three times per month. Now we’re not sure when we’ll be together again–and for us, that has been the most painful and personal part of the daily reality of COVID-19.

I love being a family physician and caring for my patients, but the mobile health center where I work was shut down this week as we transitioned to telehealth. Without personal protective equipment, we couldn’t safely care for our patients within our clinic’s tight confines.

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Not What I Expected

12 Comments / Stories / Samantha Hammond

As I struggled my way through nursing school, I never expected my first job as a nurse to feel like this; I was too busy dreaming of the day when I could hold the title of Registered Nurse.

I never expected to come home crying. I never expected that, at times, I’d mumble the words “I hate my job.” I never expected many of the challenges I face daily–but here I am, six weeks into my first hospital job, fighting to make it. Here I am, figuring out what it means to be a nurse, learning what to expect.

It is early afternoon, and I have just finished administering my last midday medication. I emerge from the patient’s room to find that five call bells are buzzing; there is no other nurse or aide in sight. I begin to wonder if everyone is purposely disappearing in order to test the new kid.

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Put to the Test

18 Comments / Stories / Roberta Turner

I’m a primary-care doctor in Washington state. I was recently confronted with a ticklish and painful situation.

Here are the facts and the sequence of events:

On a recent Wednesday morning, I saw a forty-five-year-old woman in my office for an earache. She told me that a member of her church had been diagnosed with coronavirus, and that many schools in the area were being closed because of possible exposure. Later that day I started to receive emails and phone calls from families in my practice, giving more information about this situation.

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Corona, Contagion, Confusion

35 Comments / Stories / Barbara Packer

My husband Joel, age seventy-six, has tested positive for the virus–the new big C.

Joel developed a low-grade fever on March 1. We were in San Francisco, visiting our ten-month-old grandson and his parents. They’d all had bad colds, and our grandson was still coughing and producing large amounts of sticky nasal stuff, so I wasn’t surprised when Joel got sick. (I figured that I eventually would, too.)

We went to a local urgent-care clinic. A competent physician assistant examined Joel, then assured us that he didn’t have the coronavirus: His vital signs were all good, and except for a 100.5° fever, he had no symptoms.

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Sounding the Alarm

6 Comments / Stories / Erin McCoy

For most medical students, the fourth year is a time of coming into our own. We’ve completed our clinical clerkships, passed our first board exam and begun applying to residencies in our hoped-for specialties.

We also get our first taste of independence as clinicians.

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