Savage.MD Blog

Last week I lost my first patient from my continuity clinic. It was sudden and unexpected. When I got to work I had a notification on the EMR that the patient had just been seen in urgent care and was admitted to the ICU. I checked the chart again at noon and the patient was intubated and her labs were quite abnormal. At 4 pm, I got a notification that she had passed away. I was very sad about this, and I was also sad for her husband. I called him as soon as I got the news to tell him how sorry I was for his loss. It happened so quickly and I know he was not expecting it. He and I had just touched base about how things were going last weekend. It's such a privilege to take care of people with cancer.  There's always the chance that cancer might progress despite treatment, but usually it's an incremental process and everyone has time to prepare. I think sudden loss is the most difficult. I've thought about this patient and her family a lot this week, and I know their sto...

This is Labor Day weekend! Last year I had just finished my internal medicine board certification exam and celebrated with a trip to Houston. It's hard as always to think that another year elapsed. Yesterday I went to the Getty Villa and Getty Museum in Los Angeles. My dad visited the Getty in Nov 2009 when he was in LA for a work trip. I was in my first semester of medical school back then. At that point in my life I had only been to San Diego and never LA. The pictures he showed me were really impressive and surreal. Yesterday I imagined him walking through the same galleries as me and it really was special.  I also saw a famous sculpture the 18th century artist Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. I learned about him during my psychiatry course in medical school. He had schizophrenia, and his sculptures after developed this disease were considerably different than the very typical busts that he made earlier in his career.