Jennifer Lycette is a novelist, award-winning essayist, rural hematology-oncology physician, wife, and mom (to three humans and two of the canine persuasion). She can be reached on Twitter @JL_Lycette, Mastodon @[email protected], and LinkedIn. Her first novel, The Algorithm Will See You Now (Black Rose Writing Press), a near-future medical thriller, is out in paperback and ebook. Her second novel (title and cover reveal coming soon!) will be out in November 2023.
Mid-career, Dr. Lycette discovered narrative medicine on her path back from physician burnout and has been writing ever since. Her essays can be found in The Intima, NEM, JAMA, and other journals. Her first novel, The Algorithm Will See You Now (Black Rose Writing Press), a near-future medical thriller, is now available at https://bit.ly/THEALGORITHM and on Kindle.
Jennifer Lycette is a novelist, award-winning essayist, rural hematology-oncology physician, wife, and mom (to three humans and two of the canine persuasion). She can be reached on Twitter @JL_Lycette, Mastodon @[email protected], and LinkedIn. Her first novel, The Algorithm Will See You Now (Black Rose Writing Press), a near-future medical thriller, is out in paperback and ebook. Her second novel (title and cover reveal coming soon!) will be out in November 2023.
Mid-career, Dr. Lycette discovered narrative medicine on her path back from physician burnout and has been writing ever since. Her essays can be found in The Intima, NEM, JAMA, and other journals. Her first novel, The Algorithm Will See You Now (Black Rose Writing Press), a near-future medical thriller, is now available at https://bit.ly/THEALGORITHM and on Kindle.
My alarm goes off at 3:30 a.m. for some early charting. I love these pre-work hours, even though it’s my own unpaid time. I went into debt for hundreds of thousands of dollars to have the need for sleep trained out of me. A neat side effect of this is that it also wiped away my will to resist inane admin tasks.
While I’m pre-charting, my family wakes up, or at …
Well before the advent of chat GPT, popular culture has explored how technology might affect health care, often with a dystopian bent.
Take, for example, the 2013 sci-fi movie Elysium, set in 2154 (spoilers ahead). Matt Damon’s character, Max, is exposed to a lethal dose of radiation when his factory supervisor threatens to fire him if he doesn’t perform a dangerous task. Because he can’t afford to lose his job, Max does …
About five years ago, I did the first public reading of my non-academic writing. I was a 40-something-year-old physician, and I was terrified.
It was at a narrative medicine event, and I’d been selected to read one of my personal essays. A few days earlier, an experienced performer had given me some pointers. Identified which word in each sentence should be emphasized. Where I should add dramatic pauses, I now had …
It is 4:15 p.m. in my clinic, and I’m running an hour behind.
One of my morning patients arrived acutely ill and thus required more of my time and attention than the schedule allotted for. Accordingly, every patient after that has ended up waiting for me. And, as I’m a cancer physician, each of them requires—and deserves—all my time and energy. There are no “easy” visits here.
By the end of the …
As a cancer physician, the amount of data I obtain on my patients is ever-increasing, along with options for cancer therapies. This is, as the saying goes, a good problem to have, but the amount of data management oncologists must do after hours (because there isn’t enough time in the clinic day) to keep up with the deluge of input contributes to burnout.
Many things keep oncologists up at night, …
An excerpt from The Algorithm Will See You Now.
Jacie shoved her glasses up her nose. “For those not selected, when PRIMA gives its report, or whatever… and if it says the treatment won’t work, how do you tell the patient?”
“We don’t.” Hope paused. “That’s the nurse’s job, of course.”
Cecilia gave …
After seeing recent images from OpenAI’s DALL-E-2 art generator, I decided to give it a try. I thought about a topic that I am interested in, others I know are interested in, and I was curious to see an AI’s ability to interpret. I decided on health care burnout.
In the prompt field for the art generator, I entered the words “healthcare burnout doctors nurses exhausted hope love disease …
To: [Group: all employees]
From: Office of the CEO
Subject: A fork in the road
Going forward, we will need to be extremely hardcore to streamline a restructured Health care 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly diseased world. This will mean working even longer hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will justify a new N95 mask each week.
Health care will also be much more profit-driven. Physicians and nurses will still be very …
One of my clinic patients recently asked me to administer his intramuscular medication injection. I appreciated the vote of confidence but had to tell him he was mistaken in thinking that my skill would surpass that of our nurses’.
“Trust me,” I told him. “You’re in better hands with them.”
It reminded me of the time, some years back, when I inadvertently found myself “impersonating” a nurse for a school field trip. …
Before COVID-19, I left the practice of medicine for what would turn out to become an entire year. While away, I found a new way of seeing our hearts and bodies as humans in the medical profession, allowing me to return.
Here are five lessons I learned in the hope they might help others.
1. Perfectionism doesn’t make you perfect
If perfectionism isn’t an unwritten rule in our profession, it’s, at minimum, a …
In a recent talk I gave for colleagues, I ventured outside the box.
I searched for a metaphor to make cancer treatments easy to understand. Around the same time, it so happened my kids decided we needed to re-watch all of The Avengers movies at home. (In order, of course).
Here’s where you get some insight into an oncologist-mom’s brain. While we watched the movies, another part of my brain cogitated on my upcoming …
When I first turned to writing, I had no knowledge of the field of narrative medicine.
It took four years of medical school, three years of residency, three years of subspecialty fellowship and over a decade in practice before I learned of it. (That’s more than 20 years, for those counting.)
Throughout, I’ve struggled to hold fast to my core belief that the key to patient care is to allow the telling …
I want to share how the era of immunotherapy, specifically immune-checkpoint-inhibitors, has changed the landscape of community oncology practice in metastatic non-small-cell lung cancer, for oncologists and, more importantly, patients.
I want to tell you the story of Joe. A stage IV lung cancer survivor story. (Name and details changed to protect anonymity.)
In 2015, Joe was diagnosed with stage IV non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC), adenocarcinoma. He had multiple metastases to other organs. …
So stated one of our children in their autobiography assignment for school. I kept reading, curious what would come next.
“My dad usually stays home and cleans up, and takes care of the pets.”
I thought for a moment. “That’s very good, honey, but do you think you could write something else about Dad?” I suggested. “He does other stuff too, add some more nice things.”
“OK, how about … ‘And he takes …
I am not the first physician blogger to write about the difficulties of prior authorizations, denials, and appeals, but recent occurrences in my own practice have been so convoluted that I feel they must be shared.
The nonsensical denials would almost cause one to laugh, if not for the reality that each denial represents potential delay in care for the patient and redundant work for the physician. That’s work that expands …
Mr. X. is a man in his 80s who was cured of his cancer. The question remains: at what cost?
The biologic therapy and radiation which eradicated the cancer left him with the inability to swallow and need for permanent PEG tube. Due to overall frailty and multiple comorbidities, he never graduated from the SNF and continues to reside there today.
I inherited his care after he completed his definitive treatment in …
My smile freezes on my face as my patient says to me, “I’m so glad you’re back – that I get to see Mrs. Lycette today!”
He has been my patient for several years, and I am perplexed to hear him address me as “Mrs.” rather than “Doctor.” At the same time, I really do not think he means an intentional insult, so I keep my face neutral and continue with …
Recently I found myself sitting in my car in the parking lot of my clinic, unable to will myself to open the door.
I didn’t want to head into the clinic that morning. Instead, I was filled with despair; overwhelmed with the events of the world.
How can I do it? I thought. How can I walk in there and summon the energy to see my patients?
An even worse thought: Why should …
I recently read a post by oncologist Dr. Stephanie Graff on the experience of blame, from self and others, that people with cancer are subjected to:
The talk about risk factors and early detection makes us think we can achieve perfection, and that cancer is somehow a personal fault … let us stop making accusations and blaming persons diagnosed with cancer. They are blameless.
Her post, “Read more…
My patient was sitting in a wheelchair. He was in his mid-forties, and before the cancer, had held a physically demanding job that he loved. Now, the cancer in his spine had ended not only his ability to work, but any ability to use his legs.
His wife was devoted to him in a way that seemed as natural and understated and unobtrusive as breathing.
In order for me to examine him, she …
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