Smarty Scrubs

It’s late on a Friday night. Your throat feels like you’ve been swallowing knives and your doctor’s office won’t be open again until Monday. You can’t stand it anymore so you head to your local emergency department (ED) to get some help. You check in and are asked to wait in a crowded waiting room. You’re uncomfortable, tired, and frustrated. After an hour you notice that someone who arrived AFTER you has just been called back. They weren’t bleeding or anything, they looked fine. What’s going on here? Half an hour later it happens again, someone comes through the doors and is immediately taken to a room. You decide it’s time to demand some answers. You ask the triage nurse how long you’ll have to wait, why she skipped over you. You’re sick, you’ve been waiting, you’re in pain. You’re also not dying. That is the priority in emergency medicine. Emergency departments are busy and the sickest patients need to be seen first. Nobody is in the back laughing at how long they made you...

It’s almost officially fall and you know what that means! Put down your pumpkin spice latte and go get your flu shot! What? You don’t think you need one? The CDC recommends everyone over 6 months old to get the flu vaccine. Or maybe you think the flu isn’t that serious. True, most healthy adults with the flu get only a few days of fever, body aches, cough, and sore throat. Sounds fun! But each year an average of 36,000 deaths occur in the US due to flu or complications from it. The highest rates of flu infection and complications are for young children, the elderly, pregnant women, and people with medical conditions such as asthma or impaired immune systems. Even if you don’t fall into one of those categories and want to risk being ill, you can still spread the virus. Before you realize that your sniffles are really the flu, you may have shared the illness with your coworkers or family. Or maybe you heard rumors about scary side effects. I get it. Everybody is just trying to do...