Tag Archive for: Fulton County

The Thing with Feathers

By Michelle Au ’99
Endnote, Spring 2020

Last spring my family found a bird’s nest in our garage. We noticed it by chance, high on a shelf 10 feet up, a packed swirl of twigs and pine straw about the size and shape of a catcher’s mitt. One of my kids had broken a window in our garage months before (to this day, both the projectile and culprit remain at large) and it must have been through this breach that the bird gained access. It was unclear how long the nest had been there—for all I knew, it could have been months and I’d just never noticed it. We have a way of walking right past things we don’t expect to see.

Though she was rarely sighted, we were further surprised one day to find our mysterious tenant had delivered a clutch of five Instagram-worthy speckled eggs. We cooed and marveled over this development, but when nothing happened after a few weeks, we figured the eggs had either been abandoned, or else were duds.

WATCH NOW

“Zoom in” to meet Dr. Michelle Au, Democratic candidate for State Senate 48, and join your fellow residents for a lively discussion about the issues that matter most to you. Bring a beverage of your choice to this virtual meet ‘n greet!

Wednesday, April 22, 2020
5:00 – 5:30 PM 

RSVP

Check out the map on the Voter Guide page to see if you live in State Senate District 48 and can vote for Dr. Michelle Au.

US MEDICAL WORKERS SELF-ISOLATE AMID FEARS OF BRINGING CORONAVIRUS HOME

Exposure and a lack of protective gear are fueling concerns for
the safety of frontline medical teams across the US

Nurses wearing protective clothing handle a bag with a potentially infected coronavirus swab at a drive-through testing center in Seattle, Washington. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images

Jessica Glenza in New York
Thu 19 Mar 2020 14.14 EDT

Dr. Michelle Au is an anesthesiologist and, therefore, expert at quickly and safely putting patients on ventilators. Under normal circumstances, her work is in the operating room.

But in the midst of a respiratory disease outbreak she has a new job, which is both critical and dangerous.

With the coronavirus pandemic bearing down on communities across America, her Georgia hospital – like many others – has canceled all elective surgeries and pulled her on to a specialist airway team.

 

YOUR SMARTWATCH

High-tech Health Tracker or Talisman?

By Michelle Au and Andrew Bomback 
Spring 2019

Think of the stereotypical representations of medicine, as they might appear on a television show: the crisp white coat, of course, and the stethoscope dangling at the ready. Syringes and intravenous lines, maybe. An X-ray or a CT scan slammed theatrically into a light box.

But any medical scene is incomplete without an electrocardiogram (EKG) machine running in the background, its jagged line tracing across the screen.

The EKG is the backbeat of many hospital scenes on television. Important medical things are happening here, it says.

The wearable EKG offers the comforting weight of medicine itself, worn on the wrist like an amulet warding off evil.

To tap into that potent association, many private medical practices, urgent-care clinics, community hospitals, technology companies, and health care-product designers use EKG imagery in their advertising.

Most of those images bear little resemblance to actual EKG tracings. The spikes and bumps generated for signs or emblems (like the logo of the daytime talk show The Doctors, for example) mostly amount to arbitrary peaks and valleys. They do not reflect the output of a human heart, healthy or diseased.

MEDICAL EXAMINER:
There’s a Proven Public Health Strategy We Could Use to Encourage Vaccination

As we learned with smoking, showing people visceral possible health outcomes effectively scares them into behaving differently.

By Michelle Au 
March 8, 2019 8:00am EST

In 2012, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched “Tips From Former Smokers,” its first-ever paid national anti-tobacco campaign. “Tips” featured real people suffering real medical conditions resulting from their exposure to tobacco smoke. The campaign gave them a direct platform to share their experiences, which the CDC thought would encourage current smokers to quit and dissuade future smokers from ever starting.

What distinguished this public health campaign was its visceral intimacy. In one poster, a former smoker named Shawn is posed with a lathered face, facing the camera as if it were a mirror while shaving his neck with a safety razor. The gaping orifice of his stoma—the breathing hole in his trachea surgically created after his larynx was removed—gapes at the viewer, the rim ragged with radiation scarring, a glistening red plane of muscle clearly visible under the skin. “BE CAREFUL NOT TO CUT YOUR STOMA,” the bold print reads.

SMARTWATCHES ARE CHANGING
THE PURPOSE OF THE EKG

Wearables help cast the medical test as a talisman
of health-care competence. An Object Lesson.

By Andrew Bomback and Michelle Au 
February 22, 2019 11:30am ET

Think of the stereotypical representations of medicine, as they might appear on a television show: the crisp white coat, of course, and the stethoscope dangling at the ready. Syringes and intravenous lines, maybe. An X-ray or a CT scan slammed theatrically into a light box.

But any medical scene is incomplete without an electrocardiogram (EKG) machine running in the background, its jagged line tracing across the screen reassuringly, or alarmingly to cue a dramatic threat. The EKG is the backbeat of many hospital scenes on television. Important medical things are happening here, it says.

Humanely told stories of lives saved and lost

By Michelle Au | 
March 21, 2018

For doctors, there are patients, and stories, that stick with us. They linger in the corners of our minds, stain who we are, shape what we become. Some give hope and perspective, others haunt. All doctors have such tales but not all can tell them this well.

You Can Stop Humming Now: A Doctor’s Stories of Life, Death, and In Between’’ is a collection of vignettes culled from over a decade of Daniela Lamas’s training in intensive-care medicine, where she learned to care for the sickest of the sick. It casts a steady, unblinking eye on the triumphs, failures, and blind spots of modern medicine: the seemingly miraculous extent of what we can now do for our patients and the crippling disappointment that comes with the realization of what we still cannot.

THIS WON’T HURT A BIT
(and other white lies)

My Education in Medicine & Motherhood

 

By Michelle Au 
Grand Central Publishing, 2011

Michelle Au started medical school armed only with a surfeit of idealism, a handful of old ER episodes for reference, and some vague notion about “helping people.”

This Won’t Hurt a Bit is the story of how she grew up and became a real doctor.

“An account of medicine, marriage and motherhood, executed with style and enough humor to offset the not-always-happy endings for patients… An upbeat memoir by a woman still imbued with the idealism to serve, but also to be there for her husband and two sons.” Kirkus Reviews

It’s a no-holds-barred account of what a modern medical education feels like, from the grim to the ridiculous, from the heartwarming to the obscene. Unlike most medical memoirs, however, this one details the author’s struggles to maintain a life outside of the hospital, in the small amount of free time she had to live it. And, after she and her husband have a baby early in both their medical residencies, Au explores the demands of being a parent with those of a physician, two all-consuming jobs in which the lives of others are very literally in her hands.

Au’s stories range from hilarious to heartbreaking and hit every note in between, proving more than anything that the creation of a new doctor (and a new parent) is far messier, far more uncertain, and far more gratifying than one could ever expect.

Medical School, Residency, Motherhood, Becoming a Real Doctor,
and What Happens Next