“No, no, no! I’m having a nightmare!” She shrieked through the phone. I couldn’t bear to hear it as words fell clumsily out of my mouth. “Your husband couldn’t breathe on his own. We had to put him on a ventilator. I’m so sorry.”
I was apologizing already. I’m sure she knew that it wasn’t a good sign when a physician opened with an apology. “What does that mean?” she stuttered. …
An excerpt from Fifty Years a Doctor: The Journey of Sickness and Health, Four Plagues and the Pandemic.
Our favorite internist and chairman of the internal medicine department was lecturing us on sensitivity to patients’ suffering when they have a serious illness. He stressed that our sensitivity would increase as we …
I still remember the exhilaration I felt upon learning that my peers and I could finally return to our in-person classrooms. After a year of Zoom lectures, asynchronous exams, and more, the prospect of seeing each other again thrilled us.
However, we had not anticipated the constant fear and uncertainty that would accompany this transition. Despite implementing safety measures like masking and one-way hallways, the number of COVID-19 cases continued to …
I see there has been yet another measles outbreak; at the time of writing, the count is 59 in central Ohio. All are either unvaccinated or not fully vaccinated. No doubt local pediatricians are being flooded with worried parents proffering their offspring for viewing with the statement, “Could this rash be measles, doctor?”
This certainly happened to me in 2019 when doing some primary care practice. That year experienced a massive …
Sliding toward another solstice, I feel myself yearning. I want the daylight to stay a little longer, soft like this, gentle warmth and lovely shadows, lazy breezes, the illusion of contentment.
But I am not content. Or perhaps I am, but whereas I once thought contentment was the goal, the sentiment makes me uneasy now.
“Nothing gold can stay,” Robert Frost wrote. To stay content would be to embrace the shift in …
Over the last three years, we have faced the original COVID-19, followed by Omicron, Delta, and monkeypox.
It is apropos that on the third anniversary of COVID-19, we are facing the tripledemic of COVID, influenza, and RSV.
After almost three years of not getting COVID-19, I started believing that my childhood fantasies about me being superman were true and that my immune system was superpowered with bullet-proof antibodies that would keep me …
Dear Dr. El-Dalati,
I am sorry that we will not be able to publish your recent letter to the editor regarding the Chowdhury article of 16-Sep-2021. The space available for correspondence is very limited, and we must use our judgment to present a representative selection of the material received. Many worthwhile communications must be declined for lack of space.
The response from The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) seemed simple and …
I’ve moved recently, and in the process of moving, invariably, one discovers old items. This had gotten shelved in the fracas of those years, work changed overnight, changing employers, moving. However, in a discussion with a close friend today, this resurfaced as she’s grappling with patients and family who are not seeing what she’s seeing.
Summer 2020
It’s another Sunday night family dinner. Conversation centers around catching up on the latest family …
An interview with David Quamman, author of Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus.
Rosenberg: After the publication of your 2012 book Spillover, in which the scientists you interviewed talked about expecting the “next big one,” I was surprised more people didn’t say, “Quammen told us so.”
Quammen: Actually, in Jan 2020 [as COVID-19 hit], I immediately got calls asking me how “I knew” this was going to …
They loved long walks through the woods in California. They were sweethearts in high school through college. If they wanted to take a break from their walks, the dogs would gang up on them and insist on continuing.
The trees, the skies, the quiet, the fresh smell of pine and wildflowers.
And on one clear blue sky day, Bill dropped down on bended knee and proposed to Jennifer. The breeze gently blew …
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans got accustomed to regularly answering a series of questions about our risk of exposure to COVID and our possible symptoms. For more than two years, our country remained laser-focused on this protection, demonstrating our health care system’s ability to mount a strong response to a public health crisis. So why haven’t we taken similar precautions in the face of other crises, particularly HIV?
For too long, …
As is the case throughout the country, central Ohio is in the midst of a viral surge with an unusually high number of ill children for this time of the year, leading to long delays in our urgent cares and emergency departments, in our primary care offices, and with over capacity inpatient units. It’s an extremely busy time for all of us and honestly makes for tiring and stressful days. …
For the first time since graduation from medical school, stirred by the courage of my colleagues in the ICUs and emergency rooms during the COVID pandemic, I looked back at the Hippocratic oath to reassess its charge to physicians. My wife and I, both doctors, studied and trained for a long time, and we considered the years spent and the effort put forth to be a calculated sacrifice. But amidst …
With COVID-19 vaccines now widely available for children six months and older, we join pediatricians and pharmacists across the country and urge parents to vaccinate their young children against COVID-19 as soon as possible.
Schools are open and more activities are moving indoors with the cooler weather, so now is the time to ensure your child’s vaccines are up to date. Vaccinated children are much less likely to be infected than …
The sound of beeping monitors of ICU, the blood pressure cuff going off on a patient after having detected an unsatisfactory read undisplayable on the screen, hearing a child cry while walking past ED rooms. These sounds, not alien to the ears of a physician, were no longer everyday noises that I could pass by without bothering to register. I could not figure out why such mundane and run-of-the-mill sounds …
Monkeypox has been in the news since May 2022. Barely recovering from the anxieties of COVID-19, the natural question in our mind is how is this all going to play out? We might not have accurate predictions yet, but almost six months into the outbreak, we have more information that we can rely on.
The graphs below show the number of confirmed monkeypox cases on a daily basis and on a …
Since the development of antibiotics in the 1940s, patients presenting with an infection could be expected to respond quickly to a prescribed course of antibiotics by their physician. While the antibiotic prescription model has helped countless lives, this paradigm has degraded over time due to the emergence of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The net impact is a global health crisis, worsened by continuing the over-prescription and misuse of antibiotics.
The more drugs …
Patients with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) and their allies will rally in DC, London, and Edinburgh this September to “demand bold, urgent governmental action” for the millions of people living with ME, long COVID, and other infection-associated, chronic diseases.
As researchers continue to find many similarities between ME and long COVID, the history of ME offers crucial lessons for approaching long COVID and some pathways toward more effective research …
This piece started out focusing on the impact of colds on our lives, particularly if COVID is now “just a cold.”
But now it’s personal.
My husband and I escaped COVID until now by being very careful until we got vaccinated. Once vaccinated, we focused on living our lives safely – no eating at indoor restaurants (there are plenty of outdoor venues to choose from), masking indoors and testing when gathering with …
The twice-vaxxed, twice-boosted First Lady, Dr. Jill Biden, tested negative for COVID after taking Paxlovid. And then she rebounded, just like her husband did weeks ago or like Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Chief Medical Advisor to the president Anthony Fauci did in June or like the 1 to Read more…
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