This past week I was at a large Continuing Medical Education (CME) conference held at a casino in Atlantic City. It’s been many years since I attended this conference, but the distance of time gave me a chance to appreciate how much I have evolved. Meals were served buffet style with seating at large […]
Art in Boxes: A Poem is a Container for Collisions Read More »
I wasn’t ready to write a poem about my breast cancer until I finished all my treatments. During chemo and radiation, my energy was going into survival. It wasn’t until I was in recovery from the toxic, life-saving therapy that my pen began writing. And even then, I had to trick it.
Healers Write/Writers Heal Read More »
All the third-year medical students were paired up. Debbi and I were happy to be working together. We had become good friends in the past two years. Debbi had managed to survive the grueling academic schedule despite a 90-minute commute each way, despite caring for a child while pregnant with her second. She delivered her
Crossing the First Threshold Read More »
You may have noticed that I haven’t posted in a while. I made a public commitment to post monthly, and a private commitment to post twice a month. I succeeded for three months, then I fell off my schedule. I could say that life got in the way. That’s believable for a busy clinician. The
Happiness: Finding the Way Read More »
This week, our hospital again held Schwartz Center Rounds. The topic was organ donation, and we discussed the families of the donors, the pride in the legacy of passing life onto others through death. We discussed the unbearable waiting for the transplant recipients and their families, waiting that ended with either grief or gratitude, sometimes
You Don’t Know You’re Grieving Read More »
Here’s a paradox. People actually respect you more if you say no to them. Well, actually they respect the fact that you know your goals and are willing to fight for the resources to accomplish them. I’m at a phase in my career when I want to cut back on clinical hours, but I want
The Step-by-Step Guide to Saying No Read More »
If you’ve done any reading about healthcare recently, you know that medical culture can lead to burnout. You know that depression and suicides among physicians are rising at alarming rates. You know that work-life balance is practically nonexistent and self-care is almost impossible. In the last 10 years, doctors-in-training have been enabled and empowered to
How Coyote Taught Me a Lesson Read More »
This past Monday, I had the privilege of helping to facilitate Schwartz Center Rounds at my hospital. In 1995, Kenneth B. Schwartz, at age 40, was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer. Before he died, he set up a foundation at Massachusetts General Hospital to strengthen the compassionate bond between patients and their caregivers. Today, about
Lose Track of Time Read More »
Here’s the main thing, the essence. People become the victims of their own success, because if they do something well, they get asked to do more and more. This ultimately dilutes the original greatness. If everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority. You can spend your life moving one step in 360 different
Just Say No, Gracefully Read More »
There has always been a disconnect for practitioners between doing what they do and then writing about it in the patient’s chart. This was true when we had paper charts, and the advent of EHR (electronic health records) has made the separation even wider. When my notes were on paper, written longhand, I often got
