Dr. Sour Puss

I have a family I have been taking care of since 2001. They are from Iraq and I have seen them through so much. They were basically brand new refugees that came through Jordan when I first started seeing them. There are six in the family, including a child who was a newborn in 2001. The mother had *severe* PTSD, to the point of mental status changes and total incapacity. I had never seen real, acute post traumatic stress outside of psych rotations in med school and it was scary seeing it on my own. At my current practice, DSHS wasn't able to provide an interpreter and, although the community mental health system exists as a theoretical safety net, in practice it was just impossible to get her in. Multiple times, through the father and son who spoke a little English, I told them outright that they needed to get into a community health clinic, that I didn't think I had the resources I needed to treat them. I even called and made appointments, printed out information on refugee su...

It's been more than a month since I blogged?! Life has been pretty damn hectic since I dropped the bomb that I'm leaving my job. I mean, there was all the credentialing and paperwork for my new clinic at the 45th Street Clinic , but tying up loose ends at my current practice has been unreal. I started there eight years ago as just a temporary gig while Shiree finished her training (thinking we would probably end up moving where she could find a job) but things have snowballed. I currently have so many other (mostly uncompensated) responsibilities (medical director, electronic health record champion, running the Highline Urgent Care Clinic, chair of the Director's committee, quality committee) that handing these things off to other people has probably taken 40 hours a week by itself and underscores some of the reasons why I was feeling pretty overwhelmed and ineffective. Then there's the patients. I'm touched, mostly, that so many of them have expressed so much regre...