A little over a month ago, Liberian Thomas Eric Duncan became the first person in the US to develop ebola. In the days before he died, Duncan infected two nurses. Last month, a New York doctor who had been working with Doctors without Borders in Guinea was diagnosed with the disease, becoming the fourth person to develop […]
Health/Medicine
You’ve probably done this already or if you haven’t, you will: you sit in your doctor’s office and look at your doctor, your doctor sits at a desk and types on a computer. Your doctor apologizes for the lack of eye contact and explains something about health records now being electronic and tied to reimbursement. […]
Six weeks after intricate surgery to replace an aneurysm at the juncture of my heart and aorta with a polyester graft, I’m almost back to normal. I’m walking a lot, about to start biking again, and I’m well on my way to a complete recovery. But there is still a nagging question: Does my family […]
My wife Anne and I arrived at Johns Hopkins’s gleaming new Sheikh Zayed Tower at 5:15 AM on September 8. I knew I would soon be on an operating table with my breastbone split and my ribcage cranked open, exposing my heart and the aortic aneurysm that had brought me here. A heart-lung machine would […]
October 14, 2014: At a heady, expert-packed Ebola forum assembled at Johns Hopkins University, a Liberian man said more in a minute and half than everyone else said in five hours. He summed up the United States tainted history with Liberia and begged for respect, this time around. The expert forum was the best, yet. […]
This is the third post in Affair of the Heart, a series that takes place at the intersection of a highly-experienced science writer and the medical system. by Colin Norman When my aortic aneurysm could no longer be ignored, and my cardiologist recommended a consultation with a specialist, I finally began to act like a science journalist. […]
This is the second post in Affair of the Heart, a series that takes place at the intersection of a highly-experienced science writer and the medical system. A few months after my brother almost died from an aortic dissection, when his aorta began to break down right where it emerges from the heart, I was […]
Affair of the Heart: I. A Brush with Death This is the last post in the series, Off Our Meds, in which LWON examined some scary issues in medicine but didn’t resort to fear mongering because we didn’t have to, medicine being scary enough as it is. This is also the first post in […]
