Conditions

My head used to be my greatest asset, and back in 2012, I had my life on track because of it. With a medical education and a few years of work experience on my back, I felt that I had options in life. I had even saved up to be able to buy a home. Then illness caught up with me. And not just any illness, but one of the kinds ...

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Lung cancer screening is a process that is used to detect the presence of lung cancer in otherwise healthy people at high risk for cancer. In 2020, 229,000 people will be diagnosed with lung cancer, and 136,000 people will die from the disease, making it the leading cause of cancer death in the U.S. Data show that screening for lung cancer with low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) reduces the risk of dying ...

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I wrote my undergraduate thesis on death and dying. I read journal articles trying to understand what death meant and how it affected people. I spent hours reading books, both fiction and nonfiction, trying to understand if you can ever die a good death. I engaged in meaningful conversations with compassionate and astute physicians, nurses, and professors who experienced the death of their patients, both adults and children, time and ...

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I’m not outspoken about much, but will not, can not, hold back my battle cry about masks. Would I feel so adamant if I didn’t possess a crisp death certificate with, “CORONAVIRUS 2019” in an envelope inside the file cabinet beside me? Maybe, maybe not. The envelope came sealed with a sticker embossed with the name of the funeral home that handled my mother’s funeral. I thought it was ...

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Children and teens with headaches and migraines have been affected in a variety of ways by these pandemic times. Thinking back, there has been a difference between last spring and this fall and the effect on my patients, particularly in the school environment.

In the early days last Spring, many of my patients who had been having a hard time getting to school every day due to ...

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Initially, after completing my master’s degree, I felt a bit lost. Being very busy, juggling different roles, focusing on areas of interest to the exclusion of other areas of life has long been my comfort zone. The stillness of having completed an intensive project while working full time would have been challenging enough. But in the middle of a pandemic, I found myself wandering around my house, confined, without a ...

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I’d like to preface this story by saying that the majority of the intensivists I have worked with have been exceptional, caring, and professional. We had all established a good camaraderie, and we had mutual respect for each other. We worked well together. But there always seemed to be one that was the exception. And as I drive some long miles on a recent getaway to the mountains, the flashback came back ...

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Scarcity has, in many ways, defined the COVID-19 experience in the U.S., from shortages in personal protective equipment to ICU ventilators and hospital capacity, to COVID test kits, to drugs like Remdesivir in hard-hit states. These shortages have added impetus and new dimensions to existing conversations around health care supply chains, some of which had ...

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My first—and last—clinical rotation was at a newly built nursing home attached to a community hospital near school. I didn’t have a car on campus, and hitched rides from classmates who were typically commuters with night jobs.

They were a tougher, more sophisticated breed of young women than I was used to in my hometown. They smoked, but their voices still seemed naturally lower-pitched than mine. They never squeaked ...

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