Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Life in Emergency Medicine”
I wrote recently of intubating my first suspected COVID patient. It made me feel like a huge liability to my family. We know that persons infected with COVID can remain asymptomatic for days after exposure, and that they can transmit disease during this period. One of the few characteristics I am grateful for is that so far children do not …
Our bioethics committee has been trying to formulate a coherent plan in advance of the surge of cases we expect to encounter in the ED during the COVID pandemic. Many thoughtful, brilliant colleagues have spent countless voluntary hours trying to devise a framework that will save the greatest number of people in the most just manner possible. It hasn’t been …
As part of an anticipated surge in COVID cases requiring ventilators, our hospital is preemptively preparing a framework to decide on ventilator allocation when demand exceeds supply. In the course of researching the policy, I reviewed several papers on the subject, some of which advised using specific age cutoffs in determining who should receive a ventilator. One paper in particular …
A couple of days ago I intubated my first critically ill patient with probable COVID (the test takes 5 days to return, so we never know in the moment). I should preface what I write next: Many talented people have taken on unbelievably time-consuming, entirely voluntary roles in order to ensure a robust response. My institution has risen to the …
Dear reader, if you seek distraction as a form of solace, this might be for you. It is not intended to make light of the seriousness of our current pandemic – simply to give your brain a couple of minutes to engage in a different thought process. A month ago, my wife and I tried to pull off the kind …
I worked both days over Christmas and the early morning shift on New Year’s Day. The period in between was spent visiting my folks in their coastal California enclave. We had a wonderful time seeing my parents and visiting numerous aunts, uncles and cousins in the area. Children were spoiled, mom’s famous Kahlua flan (even more indulgent than it sounds) …
While working multiple shifts over Christmas, I cared for two men my age with acute life-changing intracranial bleeds that left them half-paralyzed. In between those shifts, I spent my remaining energy reading Peter Schjeldahl’s personal history piece in the New Yorker, “77 Sunset Me.” (It appears online as “The Art Of Dying.”) Mr. Schjeldahl has been the magazine’s art critic …
Second day of winter during a weekend-long shift batch. Our ED augmented staffing for “surge mode” starting this month to accommodate an expected influx of patients that has materialized reliably every year during flu season. The kids have already left for Sunday School (thank you, brilliant wife, for arranging carpool!). My wife heads out the door to what will be …
Over the Thanksgiving holiday I came across this article detailing the fallacy that the University of Washington’s Emergency/Safe Ride Home Program has become. It made me thankful…to longer be in residency. The ACGME, which accredits residency programs, created a common program requirement for fatigue mitigation processes: It is expected that programs adopt fatigue mitigation processes and ensure that there are …
I come from a driven immigrant family. During a recent podcast interview with the ever-gracious Dr. Nii Darko, we discussed the pressures we felt with being the first generation raised in our families’ adopted country, and the responsibility we inherited to realize our parents’ dreams of success. Our professional careers, for better or worse, commonly become the validation our parents …