BITTER
The post I was planning on using can fortunately wait, because today I came across a powerful COVID-19 Essay in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) just published today about the devastating impact on frontline people caring for patients that Trump’s incompetence and malignant mismanagement has had.
I’ll admit that given my background, it probably hit me harder than most. But it will have an impact on anyone who cares about other human beings.
It was written by Dr. Anna DeForest, who is a resident in the Neurology Dept. at Yale-New Haven Hospital. Dr. DeForest also happens to have an MFA degree in writing – and this compelling essay showcases her talents.
She writes about her experience being called from a normal neurology residency to help battle COVID-19. With that in mind, and to be safe, I’ll add a potential TRIGGER WARNING.
I’ll provide the opening and closing paragraphs to help you judge:
Before I become your doctor, you have been intubated for weeks. I am a point in time, unattached to the greater narrative. I call your husband each afternoon, tell him you are stable. He asks about the medicine that props up your blood pressure. He calls it the levo, acquainted by now with the slang of intensive care. It’s true, we have pressors to assist your failing heart, a ventilator to breathe for you, venovenous hemofiltration to do the work of your kidneys. “Your wife is very sick,” I say, “but stably sick.” None of this is anything new.
…
What else is there to say? You are dead, like so many others, and the rest of us are left to live in the absence of any certainty. We can’t go on, and we go on: back to work, back to rounds, back to the next case coming crashing in. It is no use to think about the future, our training, or what happens next. We are all attending now to a historic and global suffering, and learning the limit of the grief our hearts can bear.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2016293
It’s a very short (only 12 paragraphs), but powerful piece. Feel free to save it for later if now is not a good time for you to read it.
SWEET
Staying with a medical theme, we’ve all been keeping an eye out for updates on a potential Coronavirus vaccine and additional medications that might help treat patients. Lost in this flurry of focusing on COVID, you might have missed the release of a new drug that’s a true miracle worker: Phucomol™
