burnout – Pulse

Keeping the Flame Alive

David Coulter October 4, 2019 6 Comments

This month, at medical schools across the country, first-year students will officially don the physician’s traditional white coat for the first time.

The white-coat ceremony is a powerful symbolic moment. It signifies that the students are moving beyond their identity as ordinary citizens and into their new identity as healers. The ceremony celebrates their idealism and their commitment to a life of caring for others. And, although they may not realize this, it

The Second Law of Medicine

Sandra Relyea July 20, 2018 16 Comments

Sandra Relyea ~

I sit in the cab of an old pickup truck on my father’s farm, listening to the water gurgling through irrigation tubes alongside a field. The truck is parked next to a barbed-wire fence. I’m waiting for the water to reach the far side of the field so I can pull the tubes and reset them in the next field.

As I wait, I watch the setting sun turn the

Brave New World

Rosalind Kaplan March 24, 2017 28 Comments

Rosalind Kaplan

I think a lot about quitting medicine lately. A lot.

Then I have a morning like yesterday morning:

I see a patient I’ve known for more than twenty years, caring for him through an adrenal tumor, a major gastrointestinal surgery and now renal failure, for which he needs a kidney transplant. As we review his last set of labs (stable, thank goodness), he is sanguine, hopeful. He may have found a

Medical School

Rebecca MacDonell-Yilmaz January 19, 2017 No Comments

We came to the one place I knew you dreaded.

As joyful as you sounded when you called me at work after you plucked the envelope – a big envelope this time – from our mailbox, I knew our happiness lay in the expectation that other oversized bundles would follow. For it to truly be our happiness, our dream, we would need to rejoice at this triumph, then file it away and ultimately go

Holiday Night Shift

Marilyn Barton November 20, 2016 No Comments

My hospital’s Vice President for Nursing usually wore beautiful designer suits and stayed close to her office; but she was standing before me, in the ICU, dressed in a crisp, white uniform and nurse’s cap. I wondered why she was on my unit at 1:00 a.m. after the holiday. No surprise, there was a staffing crisis, and she was politely begging nurses on six floors of units to work a little extra.

Lost in the Hospital

Christine Henneberg October 23, 2015 7 Comments

Christine Henneberg

It’s easy to get lost in the hospital. I’m only an intern, and already I know it like the hallways of my old high school, every doorway and doorknob. But overnight, as I float between the floors and the units, answering pages, I quickly lose track of where I am, what time it is, what day it is.

I am vaguely aware that I’m on the fifth floor, the top floor