Thread by @WesElyMD

1/ Typewriters & Stethoscopes:

Ann Patchett wrote a tantalizing @NewYorker piece on, among other things, tools of the trade. Reflecting on her cherished Hermes 3000 typewriter, my 🧠 wandered to the stethoscope. She ✍🏻

bit.ly/2SHw54V

@ParnassusBooks1 @MedBookClub1

2/ “I didn’t need the glasses or silver, things that represented who I thought I’d become but never did, & I didn’t need dolls, which represented who I’d been & no longer was. The typewriter, on the other hand, represented both the person I had wanted to be & the person I am...”

3/ “Finding the typewriter was like finding the axe I’d used to chop the wood to build the house I lived in. It had been my essential tool. After all it had given me, didn’t it deserve something better than to sit on a shelf?”

@ScribnerBooks
#docswhoread #nurseswhoread

4/ Patchett continues: “In any practice, there will be tests. That’s why we call it a practice—so we’ll be ready to meet our challenges when the time comes.”

Enter the convergence between her beautiful writing & my thoughts on medicine…

#MedTwitter #NurseTwitter

5/ 💭 think “medical practice.”
Of course, it IS a practice. All of us know we aren’t close to being good enough, & #COVID19 has accentuated this reality. In a stark way, for me, this is symbolized by something the dastardly #pandemic has done to a prized tool: the stethoscope!

6/ I’ll never forget the day I bought my first stethoscope. Even though it was made of indestructible metal and thick rubber, I carried Laennec’s 200 year old invention like it was a fragile, priceless porcelain figurine. As a budding physician, it quickly became a part of me.

7/ My mentors taught me how to unravel the mystery of patients’ murmurs. From the diastolic blowing murmur of his mitral stenosis to the harsh holo-systolic turbulence spewing from her aortic valve. The stethoscope meant I was a real doctor w a powerful diagnostic tool!

8/ Time churned on and technology raced ahead. ICU rooms now have a cacophony of other noises that drown out my patients’ heart sounds. Still, year after year, I stalwartly diagnosed illness with my original stethoscope…until #COVID.

9/ During my 30 years in ICU medicine, I felt stubborn as some began either not carrying a stethoscope at all, or worse, using one of the “fake” $4 toys that mask murmurs & breath sounds more successfully than they reveal them.

10/ And then last week I realized that throughout the entire #Pandemic, I have not carried my beloved stethoscope into the ICU once. Anything viewed as a fomite, including our white lab jackets, has been shed to keep #SARSCoV2 at bay. All is wrapped up, thrown away. Disposable.

11/fin
The abundance of worthless stethoscopes feels like another 💔 we’ve suffered in #COVID. I’m done in. With every surge, new variant & ICU admission of mercilessly ill, unvaccinated patients 😔, I get a little sadder. Sorry to vent, but I had to...

#GetVaccinated