No triumph today

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-transplant [...]

This is fraud

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 overheard from people who actually know what they’re doing.
This is not [...]

Completely freaking irresponsible

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 totally unscientific thinking and some seriously [...]

Marathon runner

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 usually don’t: for some of us, it’s the [...]

The way of all flesh

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 used as a noun (“I wet my pants during [...]