As I was creating Hal Winters, the character at the center of my short story, “Old Scrubs,” (Spring 2024 Intima) I imagined a rumpled, gray-haired, and unflappable older male surgeon who has seen it all. He heads to the hospital every day, goes through the motions and gets his work done without fanfare or fireworks. He hasn’t felt the spark of “why” he went into medicine for years but, as long as he remembers the “how,” he will keep plowing the same furrow.
Read morePoems Help Us Deal with Change and Choice by Anne Corey
A writer advocates for the power of poetry—as well as its curious ability to make us better accept uncertainty, mystery, and even ourselves.
Read moreHands-On versus Hands-Off Medicine: Reflections of a Surgeon
Inspired by two pieces written by medical students, a surgeon reflects on his own experiences in medicine and the role that human touch plays in the clinical encounter.
Read moreLauds: A solitary prayer at the scrub sink by pediatric surgeon Kristen A. Zeller
In the hospital, routines carry us through our days and lend a semblance of structure to the chaos of lives disrupted by illness. Some routines happen on a large scale—weekly gatherings of departments for Grand Rounds, hospital leadership meetings for safety huddles, the hustle of getting a cadre of operating rooms started nearly simultaneously in the predawn. Other routines are more intimate—the sequenced process of doing a sterile central line dressing change, the donning and doffing of PPE outside a patient’s room, the one-one-one nursing handoff at shift change.
Read moreA Simple Ritual: Reflecting on the Moments Before Surgery by poet and orthopedic surgeon Photine Liakos
Surgeons are well-known for precision and protocols. There is often a ritual nature to our actions when preparing for surgical interventions, an orderliness and discipline: checklists, time-outs, pauses, consensus.
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