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December 15, 2006
I just started a rotation on the adolescent wards, and about half of our patients have eating disorders. They are all girls, and they range in age from 12 to 17 years old.
Every day, they have group therapy meetings in the recreation room at about noon. They file by our work area in flannel pants…
December 10, 2006
Today, in another of her cantankerous and directionless "interviews," Deborah Solomon of the New York Times at least got something right. This time, the subject of her bullying is Louann Brizendine, a professor of neuropsychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Brizendine,…
December 4, 2006
During my first week of medical school, we watched a video that documented the life and death of a child diagnosed in utero with neurologically devastating spina bifida. The girl's parents had been aware of her prognosis long before her birth, but chose not to terminate the pregnancy; they cared…
November 21, 2006
I was drinking my coffee unawares the other morning when I somehow got roped into a rather unpleasant exchange.
"I don't know if anyone's told you yet," said the blonde-haired senior resident who comes from money, "but your role in the NICU is to stay awake. Don't ever, ever go to sleep when you…
October 28, 2006
The other night, I started writing about one of the things I hate about the NICU, which is that no one there talks about death. I didn't finish it, so I didn't post it, thinking I'd get to it the next night.
The following morning, instead of our usual attending rounds, we had a "debriefing," which…
October 24, 2006
These days, I snicker a little when I hear doctors say it's a privilege to take care of people. If it's a privilege to submit to this shitty schedule, that crazy attending, and those revolting bagels, I sneer, I don't want to know about the punishment. But in clinic the other day, I actually…
October 21, 2006
Today, I admitted a week-old baby whose mother didn't know she was pregnant until she gave birth to him.
Let me repeat that.
Today, I admitted a week-old baby whose mother didn't know she was pregnant until she gave birth to him.
When her contractions started last Friday afternoon, the 13th of…
October 19, 2006
It is 1 a.m. on a Thursday night, and the only light in my apartment is coming from the laptop that sits in front of me in my bed. In four hours, I'll begin my third day of a monthlong rotation through the neonatal intensive care unit (the NICU). I normally do not have trouble with sleep, but every…
October 15, 2006
When I started medical school, I was not into kids. It was partly a matter of principle--I didn't want to do what everyone else was doing, and everyone else was loving kids, so it became my business to not like kids. Another part of my distaste was the spectacular humorlessness of so many people in…
September 26, 2006
Although I more or less like all little old ladies, there's a certain subset of the genre that I love. The ones who are over 80 with the skinny bodies and the voices creaky like rocking chairs-they completely do me in.
When I go into their hospital rooms early in the mornings, I watch them for a…
September 24, 2006
This month, I'm rotating through a small community hospital that is affiliated with the academic center where my residency program is based. For residencies based in well-staffed, well-resourced academic centers, the point of having their residents rotate through a community hospital is to expose…
September 16, 2006
"Is someone down?" asked T., who was driving. We were on our way back from an intern retreat day in the mountains, and while stopped at a traffic light, we had noticed a cluster of people standing in the oncoming lane of traffic. Looking out my door into the dark, I could make out three people…
September 7, 2006
On my first day as a medical resident in clinic, one of the patients on my roster was listed as having a chief complaint of "genital rash." No big deal, I thought to myself. I am a young, progressive, body-positive doctor. Everyone has genitals! I am unfazed by genitals! Let there be a genital…
August 20, 2006
Today has been an unbelievably frustrating day in the hospital, but I don't want to bring anyone down. In an effort to promote peace, harmony, and blogular happiness, I'm going to instead write about something everyone can get excited about: the patriarchy.
Earlier this year, the venerable…
August 16, 2006
I have heard through the grapevine that certain people are not so interested in reading what I write here because it is, and I quote, "too sad."
It's never occurred to me that my job is especially sad. Yes, I'm surrounded by sick people, and yes, most cheese danish to be found in our hospital is…
August 13, 2006
Since I came on the medicine service, my team has been taking care of a man who because of one of his unfortunate afflictions I will call Mr. Scrotum. Mr. Scrotum is a 70-something man who came to the hospital with an infected prosthetic knee joint. He had surgery to clean it out, then came to our…
August 8, 2006
It was bound to happen sooner or later: I finally broke someone.
Last Thursday, we admitted an 84-year old lady with bad disease of her kidneys and their vasculature. Her kidneys were too sick to make urine, making her a good candidate for hemodialysis. (In hemodialysis, a patient's blood is…
August 1, 2006
On Sunday, we admitted a new patient to my team, a young, kind of hip lady with an 8-month history of progressively worsening abdominal pain, fever, night sweats, and weight loss. All signs pointed to pancreatic cancer, which generally has a very poor prognosis. So it was a little confounding when…
July 31, 2006
I got a spot of blood on my dress today. It happened as I was on my way out of the hospital and heard the code bells ring. I ran, cursing, past two women clutching each other in a hallway, into a room where a man was lying unconscious in a chair, blood trickling from his mouth. He was a pre-…
July 27, 2006
As a brittle, childless spinster, I don't have child-rearing experiences of my own to draw on. Yet every day in clinic, I make reassuring eye contact with haggard looking, applesauce-spattered people, and explain to them how to raise their children. I have no data to back me up-only snippets I've…
July 20, 2006
This is why people who don't know science shouldn't write about it as if they do. I don't care how much she's "mulled it over"-the author of the recent New York Times opinion piece about compulsory vaccination of girls with the vaccine against HPV makes some dangerous assertions here based on…
July 17, 2006
As part of our resident education program, there is an hourlong noontime conference at the hospital five days a week. The subject is usually something medical, like "Diagnosis and treatment of urinary tract infection in the elderly." Although you might expect us to resent these conferences, we…
July 10, 2006
You'll hear residents everywhere refer to "codes" as both the most terrifying and the most exhilarating experiences they have during training. "Code" is short for "code blue," or "code red," or whatever term each hospital applies to situations wherein help is needed in resuscitating a patient. It's…
July 8, 2006
When I was a little kid, we had a yearly raffle at my elementary school that I won every year with such weird regularity that I started to think of myself as lucky. It's been a long, downhill slide ever since, but when I started residency a couple of weeks ago, it seemed I might have gotten my game…
July 1, 2006
My parents call me every few days and ask to hear stories. Sometimes I'm contrary about it, and just rattle off a list of diagnoses and interventions. But I know that's not what they want. They want a heroic ideal. They want a dramatic arc. They want a story.
To get to the ICU, you have to be…
June 25, 2006
I'm recovering from my first full call day in the medical intensive care unit, the MICU. Call in our MICU is a morning-to-morning shift, which means being awake all night, unless you can justify sleeping. It was a relatively quiet night for us, so we got about 5 hours of sleep-a full night's worth…
June 23, 2006
Today was my first day of residency. In the large, academic medical center where I work, the wards were filled with people like me: kids fresh out of medical school, creases still not washed out of our long white coats, playing with the buttons on our beepers, looking for the bathrooms. For the…