I opened my obligatory late-afternoon email to find my work schedule for the next morning: three general anesthetics for MRIs. My heart sank. A week before, I had been assigned to the new neuro MRI suite for a 6-hour interventional radiology procedure, followed by another intervention in the CT …
You Never Hear Doctors Say, "I Can’t Come In Today, I’m Sick."
The surgery resident was seeing stars as she sutured the wound. "I need a chair," she whispered, slowly sitting back into the air behind her (where no chair currently existed). The nurse caught her, and I ran over. "I'm just not feeling well. I threw up earlier this morning." I gave her an …
You Never Hear Doctors Say, "I Can’t Come In Today, I’m Sick."Read More
What Anesthesiology Residents Defined As Effective Teaching Applies to Everyone
The journal Anesthesiology recently published an interesting article in their annual January 2014 Education Edition. It's called Resident Assessment of Better-Than and Worse-Than-Average Clinical Teaching, by Bishr et al. The authors reviewed a year's' worth of resident reviews of all faculty …
What Anesthesiology Residents Defined As Effective Teaching Applies to EveryoneRead More
New Year: Different, Yet Same
It's the new year, and I often start it off by doing a little decluttering. In efforts to clean out my study, I came across my medical school yearbook. Each student in my class was given a page in the book that was headed with our (new and strange) "MD" signature and a picture of us in our white …
Is it really just luck?
The word "lucky" is overused, so much so that it has come to represent a number of related concepts. "Beginner's luck" refers to the steep learning curve of a new activity. We are lucky when we escape an adverse event/fate. We've all had the thought, "I am so lucky" when we see someone less …
The Case for M&M’s
No, this is not a blog post about those little round candies... In the medical world, M&M stands for Morbidity & Mortality Conference. In other fields or any corporate environment where long-term projects come and go, it can be referred to as a Post-Mortem. Much like an autopsy, medical …