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Oct 24, 2024 | 
opmed.doximity.com | Jennifer Boyle |Jordan Frey |Forrest Bohler |Paul Bergeron
It was 4 a.m. and nearing the end of a long night shift. All the fetal heart rate monitors showed well-behaving babies and I desperately felt the beckoning of my call room bed. Suddenly, one of the heart rate tracings plummeted. Ninety-nine percent of the time this type of deceleration resolves quickly. Things don’t just instantly change from OK to life-threatening — except when they do.
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Apr 18, 2024 | 
opmed.doximity.com | Soubhana Asif |Corinne Carland |Chris van Eyck |Jennifer Boyle
The summer of 2015 was the first time I fasted while away from home. I had three roommates and no kitchen. Huddled in the foyer of my dorm room, I quietly ate a banana, a pack of small chocolate chip muffins, and Stacy’s Pita Chips along with some hummus as my sehri, a predawn meal for Muslims fasting during Ramadan. I would pray, go to class, study, work on my papers, and break my fast with something from the dining hall. The novelty of fasting alone for Ramadan quickly wore off. I missed my family.
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Apr 18, 2024 | 
opmed.doximity.com | Corinne Carland |Soubhana Asif |Chris van Eyck |Jennifer Boyle
When my best friend died, my mother drove seven hours to my apartment to deliver the news in person. She caught me as I fell to the ground repeating “no” in disbelief. She dialed my chief resident because I couldn’t see the phone number through my tears. The loss was shattering, but despite my fall, the landing was safe. I knew my friend’s prolonged struggle and the exhaustive treatments she had endured.
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Apr 17, 2024 | 
opmed.doximity.com | Chris van Eyck |Jennifer Boyle |Nishant Pandya
As a PA, Do I Regret Not Going to Medical School? We have no “do-overs” in life. Oftentimes, we ruminate on our life choices, and wonder if we made the right decisions. Would I do it all over again? Now that I have walked the walk, would the steps I took be the same? My role in health care is very similar in many aspects to those of a physician, however, my title has the additional “assistant,” or “associate” tag on the end. What does it mean to be an “assistant” in health care?
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Apr 15, 2024 | 
opmed.doximity.com | Nishant Pandya |Jennifer Boyle |George Vetrovec
“Can’t we heal him faster?”I was sitting across from a teenage soccer player and his mother. His ankle was not fractured. It was swollen after an opponent stepped on him. As I discussed conservative management centered around rest, the sullen 15-year-old nodded attentively. His mother shook her head, barely hiding her frustration. “He just recovered from a knee sprain and a pulled hamstring. He has a soccer tournament this weekend.
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Apr 15, 2024 | 
opmed.doximity.com | Jennifer Boyle |Nishant Pandya |George Vetrovec
Disclosure: Researching and writing about this topic has served as a kind of therapy for me. I found myself in need of such therapy because recently I realized that I was tip-toeing closer and closer toward a bad place. This bad place is the mental state where you start to bristle at the thought of checklists and huddles and time-outs and debriefs — and here’s a secret, they’re all checklists by different names. I even found myself wondering if safety culture could ever make things less safe.
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Jan 29, 2024 | 
opmed.doximity.com | Hailey Roumimper |Alex Koo |Teresa Samson |Jennifer Boyle
Donning green scrubs and a face mask, I stepped through the door, smiling. I had first appeared in this doorway a week ago, and had shown up every morning since. All of my other patients came and went in less than a week, but Mr. Wilson was here for the long haul. His hospitalization lasted 39 days, to be exact, which overlapped almost perfectly with my scheduled time as the intern on service.
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Jan 25, 2024 | 
opmed.doximity.com | Alex Koo |Teresa Samson |Jennifer Boyle |Joy Westerman
Three Ways Physicians Can Actually Practice MindfulnessStress seems to be a given with being a physician or APP. We feel directly responsible for the health of our patients and – for many of us – tie our identities to a diagnostician, a healer, an advocate. We stay late to help resuscitate a critically ill patient at shift change. We help educate a patient on their antihypertensives while doing drop-off at school.
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Dec 11, 2023 | 
opmed.doximity.com | Nishant Pandya |Giulia Faison |Jennifer Boyle |Bryan Jepson
The Cost of a Child's Cold Without Paid Sick LeaveAs an urgent care pediatrician, I regularly see young children with fever, cough, and congestion. The majority of these patients have symptoms caused by viral infections that can be managed safely at home. Families feel an initial relief after learning their child does not need to go to the ER or require long-term treatment. However, telling a parent when their child can return to day care is more challenging.
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Dec 7, 2023 | 
opmed.doximity.com | Jennifer Boyle |Bryan Jepson |Jessica Reeves |Avneet Soin
It’s no secret that health care in our era of “a thousand clicks” is hard. The days and nights are long and often seem filled to the brim with mundane and painful tasks. In medicine, we are asked to give — our expertise, our time, our compassion, our skills. Giving to others is why we entered this field. And yet, to keep giving, we must be replenished. We are precious health care resources and we must work to preserve ourselves.
