Go from burnt out to FIREd up.
Raising a preadolescent is a novel experience for me. Lots of labile feelings that must-be-released-right-NOW! Heretofore unseen levels of resistance over what were previously accepted responsibilities and conventions: Doing dishes. Maintaining hygiene. Not leaving wet towels on the floor of one’s room. My wife likes to joke that her departed grandmother always had a knack for asking the most sensitive …
A Romeo Among Swordsmen I was a weird kid in my middle school years. I didn’t fit neatly into any cookie cutter categories. I played Dungeons and Dragons with smart, socially awkward boys in the 6th grade. Boys with pallor that stood out among southern California tan. Boys who read incredibly thick fantasy books and practiced speaking Elvish to one …
Disclosure: I am an affiliate, and make a modest commission when readers purchase the Pandemic Survival Guide for Physicians using my link. Dike Drummond, a.k.a. The Happy MD, is a Mayo-trained family physician whose personal struggle with burnout led him to leave clinical medicine in 2011 and instead pursue physician coaching and burnout prevention as his full-time vocation. Let’s go …
At this moment in history, where many assumptions I’d made about reality are being rapidly discarded, it’s valuable to identify those few constants to keep me tethered (however tenuously) to the world. The regional pillars of my world come down to two individuals and one species. Shirtless Keith I didn’t know it at the time we bought our home, but …
Cory Fawcett recently wrote a thoughtful, grounded post about his father-in-law’s death and the many logistical hurdles he and his family overcame. It’s a lot of work to bury someone with a tribute befitting a full life, especially when also attempting to honor requests from those closest to the deceased. One of the details Cory described struck a chord with …
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 …