The young lady was exhausted and anxious. Her long brown hair was matted and sweaty. Her natural birth plan for her 2nd baby was shattered despite laboring all night. Not long ago, the baby monitors had started to alarm. It was clear that the unborn baby was not getting enough oxygen to stay alive! The…
“I’m completely burned out right now, I just want to sleep.” A quote from one of my fellow anesthesia residents who is brilliant, empathetic and initially very cheerful. I hear or read about burnout a dozen times a week. The World Health Organization expanded the definition: “Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic…
“I’m only allowed to fly VFR.” We heard the new pilot say to the air traffic controller over the radio on a beautiful starry night last week. He meant that he needed to be able to see where he was going and wasn’t qualified to fly through fog or clouds using only instruments. The conversation…
Shocker and I were flying at night over Iraq the first time the hydraulics in our F-15E failed. The screaming master caution light got my heart racing! Flashing lights and warnings filled our dark world demanding our attention. Fortunately, Shocker used the checklist to quickly bring our emergency training back to mind. We had covered…
It’s been a while since I’ve taken the time to post my thoughts. As an update, I’ve graduated from medical school and started my anesthesiology residency. For eight months I have had the amazing opportunity to rotate through different floors of the hospitals as the intern, (FNG for the aircrew reading this). Each month I…
I graduate from medical school in two weeks. It has taken me nearly seven years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to get this far. I transitioned from one profession of service into another and truly can’t wait to get after it. I can’t wait to hear the relief in a patient’s voice when I’ve told…
Medicine has both a different language and a unique way of recording every patient visit. We are taught how to write a SOAP note during our first year and graded on these notes for the rest of school and career. An acronym for Subjective, Objective, Assessment and Plan; the SOAP note is supposed to be…
After every flight in the US Air Force, there is a debrief. This is bred into our culture from the very first hop in pilot training. In 2,000 hours of flying fighters, I can probably count on one hand the number of flights that we didn’t debrief. Debriefs provided much of our learning and is…
Last month, my classmates and I found that most of the hospitalized patients we cared for could really use the skills of a Physical Therapist (PT). Physical therapy was the only way some of our patients were going to fully heal and return to their past lives. A smart classmate recognized, however, that she was…
I took a break this month from churning through textbooks to refresh a bit. I needed to refuel my studying stamina for the board exams looming this summer. I was even able to read a few real books! As I quickly swiped through them I found some cool points worth highlighting. First is “Growing Physician…
Fighter Pilot to Physician 