Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Uncategorized”
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 …
I have been traveling independently since the summer after I graduated university, when I took a two-month budget solo trip across Europe. I had not originally planned to travel alone. When the friend from high school who was planning to join me backed out of the trip, I decided to read up, double down and commit to solo travel. That …
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 …
Dear reader, I realize these topics are light fare in comparison with what we deal with on a daily basis during the COVID pandemic. Some posts were written before it unfolded, others are my attempt to engage my brain in a manner other than the apprehension that characterizes many of my waking hours. If you seek distraction as a form …
I was at a conference in Vegas last week when local manifestations of the global crisis occurred in rapid succession. The day after I departed, our district announced that local schools would close for at least the next two weeks. A day later, an older immunocompromised loved one was hospitalized with a viral pneumonia (thankfully not COVID). My loved one …
Confessions Of A (Former?) Drama Geek I was a teenage Madrigal. The Madrigals were our high school’s premiere mixed vocal music group, and our Broadway-influenced musical director made sure we had choreography and a mix of classic and contemporary vocal arrangements to make even the most sedate nursing home audience stand up and pop wheelies with their walkers like the …
45 years ago, British economist Charles Goodheart inserted what he considered a snarky aside into an otherwise serious academic publication: Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes. Was his humor hard to recognize due to his being a British academic or due to his being an economist? Hard to say. …