Dawn Baker is an anesthesiologist and author of Lean Out: A Professional Woman’s Guide to Finding Authentic Work-Life Balance.
An excerpt from Lean Out: A Professional Woman’s Guide to Finding Authentic Work-Life Balance.
In the third grade, my teacher identified me as a high achiever. Aside from recognition, he “rewarded” me with the opportunity to write an extra report on a topic of my choosing every month. Being young and …
“I wish I had known how common this is. I would have started sooner.”
It is currently estimated that one in four women physicians has infertility (compared to one in eight in the general population). Why do I care? Because I’m one of them. But truly, we should all care. These women are our partners, colleagues, trainees, and friends. Their experiences shape the landscape of physician wellness for all of us.
To …
Spring 2020 has brought a disproportionate amount of grief for many of us. The losses include mortal ones, such as the death of a loved one, a colleague, or a patient. We’ve lost productivity, opportunities, and income. We’ve also lost freedoms, from the personal liberty to go where we please to our ability to spend time alone (due to quarantine in close quarters with family members). And as an anesthesiologist, …
I walk by the closed double doors and frosty windows of the ICU. You’re lying in there, intubated. It feels weird to go to work now. I can’t see you or talk to you, don’t know the drips, don’t know the plan … and it’s killing me. I, along with many others, desperately want to express my love. So many feelings are swirling inside:
Guilt. For having a chill workday that …
One of the things I most enjoy about being an anesthesiologist is the wide variety of patients that I see. You never know who you’re going to have the privilege to care for on a given day. Although my group is large, I will occasionally be assigned to a patient that I personally know. And occasionally, someone I know will request me as their anesthesiologist.
Last month I took care of …
I opened my obligatory late-afternoon email to find my work schedule for the next morning: three general anesthetics for MRIs. My heart sank. A week before, I had been assigned to the new neurosciences MRI suite for a 6-hour interventional radiology procedure, followed by another intervention in the CT scanner. My first thought: Who is trying to punish me?
It’s well known in the anesthesiology field that these types of cases …
The patient had arrived for a urology procedure with a blood glucose in the 400’s. He suffered from a recent stomach bug and had gotten off schedule with administration of his meds. While his GI symptoms had subsided, he was feeling crappy overall. I decided to cancel his case and went about initiating treatment to get his blood sugar under control. When I informed the urologist of my findings and …
What does it mean to be a professional? And how do we maintain our professionalism at a time when things such as stress, burnout, and caregiver fatigue threaten our motivation? As an anesthesiologist, the ability to remain professional in many scenarios is something I constantly strive for. Aside from how it affects my relationships with the interdisciplinary OR team, professionalism is an important attribute given that my job requires patients …
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