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Tag: work-life balance

Balancing Home and Work

By Theresa O. Wyrick, MD I went to medical school thinking I would do pediatrics or OB/GYN because that was my perception of what women physicians did. I was in my third year of medical school and had just completed both of those clinical rotations and realized neither was my calling. I wanted to do […]

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Looking for Dinosaur Eggs

By William Hagberg, MD We are all experiencing the COVID pandemic and its devastating and far-reaching effects on our lives and those we love. For those of us not on the front lines of the battle, the pandemic has forced drastic and unexpected changes in our professional lives. Our office and our O.R. schedules have been altered […]

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Something’s Gotta Give

By Alexander Lauder, MD Why do we go into hand surgery? What goals do we have in our career? What goals do we have in our personal life? Are these aligned? A mentor once described work-life balance as a triangle with the apices representing professional career, personal life/family, and monetary income, noting that “You are […]

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Needing and Accepting Help

By Emily Slate, MD I looked into the eyes of the woman sitting across the exam room table from me. She had told me what she could remember of the car accident and the subsequent hospitalization. We had gone through the extensive exam and I had reviewed her studies. I had drawn my best version of the brachial […]

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Embracing the New Normal

By Orrin I. Franko, MD What if a post-COVID world is actually better than “returning to normal”? As physicians, we routinely push beyond our routines and comfort zone when faced with new information, typically in the form of peer-reviewed studies contradicting long-held beliefs. As surgeons, we often find ourselves in a position to improvise intra-operatively, only to discover […]

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April 27: The New Normal

By Amy Woznick, MD, FACS Today is Monday April 27, 2020. It has been over 6 weeks since the Governor of Michigan issued all schools to close, and within a week everything else was shut down. Our level one trauma center canceled all non-emergent surgeries. Office appointments were cleared. I assumed this was a temporary […]

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Today is May 4th

By Margaret K. Jain, MD My perspective in this crisis is not unique—I’ve traded surgery for home-schooling, chasing children, Nexflix binges and home workouts.  But probably the biggest change to my daily life has been an abundance of time—time not committed to patients or staff, but simply, and suddenly, for me.  This luxury is one […]

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Trailblazing in Orthopedic Hand Surgery

By Julie A. Melchior, MD When I was accepted to an orthopedic surgery residency in 1991, I and two other women from my class who had also matched to orthopedic surgery were invited out to dinner by one of the senior orthopedic surgery residents who was a woman. She gave us some advice I’ve often […]

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Being Present

By Roger Cornwall, MD Last week, at the end of a long and stressful day balancing clinic, surgeries, and lab grant applications, I did something that no sane, nearly 50-year-old hand surgeon should probably do. But it ended up being exactly what I needed. I walked into a local gymnastics gym to practice with the […]

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