During my medical training, I always seemed to find myself at the Veterans’ Affairs Hospital around Thanksgiving or Christmas. The day of the holiday itself was usually eerily quiet: We’d scrounge some holiday goodies from the nursing desks, eat a cafeteria dinner, and watch football or reruns of It’s a Wonderful Life, just like everyone else in America.
It was the day after the holiday that things would get interesting.
For healthy people, holiday excess—too much salty or spicy food, or too many cocktails in the form of an eggnog overdose—leads to an expected tummy ache, headache, and general post-party malaise.
But for people with heart or kidney failure or problems with alcohol or depression, the holidays are far more dangerous. It was often the day after the celebration that we’d see the fallout: the man in congestive heart failure after breaking his usual low-salt diet, the dialysis patient who tried to eat right but ended up buying high-potassium gravy (dangerous only if your kidneys don’t work), or the alcoholic who fell off the wagon—and fell hard. Read More
For the past three weeks, each issue of The New England Journal of Medicine has featured 
A number of news outlets have picked up an 
We treated a very old woman in the hospital this week. She was nearly 100, but looked ageless, sitting by the window and watching the world go slowly by her. She had gotten unsteady and short of breath at home and was waiting for us to make things better.
Last week, I wrote about 
I was at the hospital late one night last week, seeing a patient in the intensive care unit. It’s oddly relaxing sometimes to be at the hospital late—not as much hustle and bustle, and no need to fight for a chart or a computer. There were just a few on-call interns and residents clustered around the charts, and a group of night nurses who were ordering takeout for dinner. A quiet night.
