Patient Zero: Doing My Part From Home While Battling COVID-19
My husband Tom isn’t afraid of anything; strapping on a bulletproof vest every day for work will do that to a man. Tom wasn’t scared until I couldn’t breathe.
Featured
Resident Physician Contributing Writer
Bryn Mawr Family Practice
Dr. Amanda Stahl Piraino grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and graduated from the University of Scranton with her undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Biology. She earned her medical degree from the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. Dr. Stahl Piraino chose family medicine because “it is a dedication to walking with our patients when they struggle to stand: to walk with them on good and bad days, to fight for their well-being when they cannot fight for themselves, and to hear their hopes, dreams, and fears when others find it hard to listen.” She is interested in preventative care for all ages and osteopathic manipulative medicine. She enjoys Disney trips with her husband, cooking, and walking their German Shepherd, Stella.
Bosses of Us: Doctors, Administrators, and the Profit Motive
The pandemic points to an important lesson: a rejection of traditional leadership structures, at least those that feed into a profit-based medical system, may be necessary in order to create a different world. The union provides such a framework, vesting power in a collective of voices. But in order to succeed at the level of a union, physicians need to let their voices join that collective — they cannot expect a delegate or representative alone to do the entire job, just as we might expect a program director to guide us in the right direction.
The Coronavirus Catastrophe is Man-made, And So Will the Way it is Remembered
In the first two months of 2020, I watched with alarm as a cordon sanitaire descended on Wuhan. I lived there as an anthropologist completing my research on Chinese medicine in 2017. Friends from Wuhan — most of them doctors — were suddenly describing scenes out of a dystopian nightmare.
I Am Not a Hero
When I found out I was going to be deployed to treat patients with COVID, I dealt with a lot of existential dread. I remember feeling like I was leaving medicine behind when I matched to a psychiatry residency, and again after I finished the medicine portion of my intern year.
Training in the Time of Coronavirus: Our Rights to Serve and to Survive
The Collective for Resident Rights at Yale wrote the following list of demands, under our rights as medical trainees, related to the COVID era. It is time to organize. Our collective voice cannot be silenced.
Essential Versus Non-Essential in COVID-19: One Fellow’s Perspective
I’m a soon-to-graduate allergy and immunology fellow and the circumstances surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic have catapulted every single physician into uncharted, and sometimes strange circumstances.
All That She Lost
When I first met Rita, she didn’t make things easy. She fired a barrage of questions at me, punctuating her litany with the dreaded blow to every resident’s ego — “Are you a student?” — before slouching back on her bed, sweat glistening on her gray-streaked temples as though she had run a marathon.
Tears for the Warriors Without Armor in the Fight Against COVID-19
It is difficult to put into words the level of frustration and despair that I have felt over the last few days watching the schizophrenic national response to this COVID-19 crisis and its detrimental effects on the work conditions of my colleagues. As an internal medicine physician working in Utah, it feels like it is the calm before the storm as emergency room and urgent care volumes are down as people try to socially distance to correct the spread of this virus. Other areas of the country are not so lucky.
Facing the Inevitable: A Resident Physician’s Perspective on the COVID-19 Pandemic
As I check in on my patients each morning, I wonder if some will unexpectedly decompensate and die over the coming weeks. I think about myself and my co-residents who are in the hospital all day swabbing patients for COVID-19 without adequate personal protective equipment. Many of my co-residents are on home isolation as a result of this exposure, waiting for their test results and praying that our government will step up and fund more mask production, or civilians will return the N95s they’ve hoarded, or the set of a TV medical drama will donate their props to us.
Connecting Virtually: One Resident Physician’s COVID-19 Week
It was a beautiful late winter Sunday, and my husband and I decided to drive to Plum Island, in the quaint sea town of Newburyport just north of Boston, for some bird-watching and ocean views. I wondered how my sister-in-law was doing — her wedding was scheduled in just seven days, and she and her fiancé had already been faced with tough decisions because of the coronavirus pandemic.
A View From the Frontline: COVID-19 and the UK Doctors’ Perspective
Earlier last week, one patient had been referred in from their family physician, and the onsite senior resident, Adam, had been the doctor to assess them. Symptoms were vague — generally unwell, off food, bit of a cough, possible headache. Viral swabs were taken, because pretty much anyone that had lately walked through the hospital door with even a suspicion of sepsis now had samples sent off.
Routine Infection Prevention Will Not Contain COVID-19
As an internal medicine resident working at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, COVID-19 has taken over our workroom conversations as the number of new cases enters exponential growth. As an anthropologist who lived in Wuhan for a year and has regularly kept in touch with physicians there since the city was placed under lockdown on January 23, 2020, COVID-19 has proved to be an unprecedented crisis.
Resident Physician Contributing Writer
Mount Sinai Hospital
Miao Jenny Hua is a first year internal medicine resident at the Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. She also has a PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago. Her dissertation on the integrated Chinese and Western health care system in China took her to spend over a year in Wuhan, China from
2016-2017. Since the lockdown of Wuhan on January 23, 2020, she has been in regular communication with her physician friends at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic.