My journey to balance family, work, and water polo.
Doctors and their Mental Health: Time to Lead and Lean In.
Something was not right, and that something was the first-year resident in front of me. He had come down to the emergency department (ED) to admit a patient to the intensive care unit, full of a frenetic energy that was out of place for the midnight hour. I was the...
Guest Post: Control
It is my pleasure to introduce to the readers of Balance, Dr. Rebecca MacDonell-Yilmaz. Becky is a pediatrician out on the East coast who has not only just completed a fellowship in hospice and palliative care medicine, but has just embarked on her third board...
From Flowers to Dostoyevsky and the Road In-between
I am sitting in the parking lot, waiting for the local bookstore, The Book Bin, to open. I am here because of a flower. And a pear tree turned maple. And a sense of time and space. And the writer Dostoyevsky. Sipping my morning coffee, with the Jeep’s soft top down, I...
Taking a Step Back to Move Forward
This was first written and posted on Doximity's Op-(M)ed and can be seen by clicking here... I will be writing monthly for them and hope to have a year-long discussion about the trials and travails of being part-time. Whether its enjoying more time with the kids,...
Solitude and Connection
Two friends (younger than me by more than two decades) are training for the Ironman and I decided to join them for their first of two 40-mile loops. I had already decided to defer my own race entry to next year due to a combination of aches and pains, along with...
There Are No Words
Picture Credit (John Moore/Getty Images) "...if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices. "we must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere." "When human...
Top 5 Lessons Learned for the New Interns
Welcome new PG-1’s! One day you wake up a medical student. Then by the afternoon you are a MD. A few short days later, you are now in the hospital no longer looking for someone to co-sign your orders in the EMR. It’s a crazy time, full of excitement as well as an...
The Nocturnists and the Healing Power of Storytelling in Medicine
A few years ago, I stumbled upon the Moth Stories. Originally based out of New York, but now in cities around the country, people would come together at a venue to share and listen to personal stories based on a theme for the evening. Ten people, randomly selected...
Balance 2.0?
So, a wannabe author/writer walks in to a writer’s conference… Sounds like the beginning of a not very funny joke. But, that was me earlier this month as I attended the Harvard’s Writing, Publishing and Social Media Conference for Healthcare Professionals. Quite a...
The pace and path to mindfulness
Fast I eat. Fast. Often, I consume the food I place on my plate before I even make it to the kitchen table. It’s as if I grew up during times of famine, desperate for each and every morsel. On the rare night my family has dinner together, I am usually finishing just...
Death, Dissonance and the Doctrine of Double Effect.
This post was first published on Doximity's Op-(M)ed "First Stab" Collection on 5/2/18 under the title: Should I Heal or Comfort? Chicago, in February, was dark and cold. Even more so at 5:00 AM, when scraping ice and snow from my windshield before heading to the...
How Do You Know When Someone Is Broken?
How do you know when someone is broken? When their spirit is fractured? When their sense of self no longer aligns with what once was. When you feel as if you have woken up in a foreign land, but that sense of displacement is coming from you, not your surroundings. In...