an itinerant observer

Ready to traverse a landscape rich with human emotion, ethical quandaries, and the quest for meaning amidst chaos? ‘ Poems from the (ER) Pit’ offers a glimpse into this world, not through clinical case studies, but through the visceral medium of poetry. Each poem illuminates diverse facets of emergency care. Through poetry I navigate the emotional, ethical, and philosophical terrains of emergency medicine. This collection, more than a series of poetic expressions, is a call to reflect, to empathize, and to act. It invites you into the heart of emergency care, challenging you to see beyond the clinical to the deeply human(e) side of healing. ******************************************************** In the dim light of dawn, a child’s battle ends, not with triumph, but with silence. This moment, captured in “C’est La Vie” is a stark reminder of emergency medicine's raw reality. The poem serves as a prelude, inviting us to confront life’s precariousness and the profound impact of...

“Baba, today you may pick me up early and take me to the zoo”. And thus Noori had spoken. Noori the kindergartner was obviously having some withdrawal symptoms since she had not been to the zoo in over a month. Noori and Baba frequented the zoo, at times twice a month, albeit for brief visits. Having a yearly membership to the Houston zoo enabled such frequent jaunts to one of the most favorite shared activity spots for the daughter-dad duo. What was more likely though: Mowgli’s spirit had entered Noori that morning, the way she was rattling off about the characters of the jungle book. After school I took Noori straight to the zoo. Hence, the jungle book, without offense to Mr. Kiping, was re-drafted by Ms. Noori. Mr. Sher Khan and Mrs. Sherni Khanum were ignoring each other. They had an argument about who was arranging dinner that night. Colonel Haathi was brushing his tusks after a huge meal of elephant chow. Bagheera was pacing up and dow...

Innovative app wins top prize at AKU’s first-ever Hackathon Four innovative solutions in emergency medicine receive awards Innovators at Pakistan’s first-ever medical hackat​hon at the Aga Khan University have proposed new ways of tackling challenges facing Pakistan’s emergency rooms (ER). HistorER , the winning team at the Hackathon, came up with a unique QR (quick response) code system to address a persistent challenge faced by ER doctors. Patients are often brought to emergency by family members or by bystanders who are not aware of their medical history. In the absence of critical information, doctors face delays in performing life-saving procedures.     The HistorER team has suggested that every person carry a medical card with a QR code with vital details: blood group, allergies, current medication and previous operations. Scanned, the QR code would provide doctors immediate access to information and the ability to ini...

What’s the chance of a bad outcome,lik e death, in Karachi? Based on anecdotes circulated on social media and what you read in the news, you might assume that chances for a series of unfortunate events remain high in this city. This prompted a friend to do some calculations to gauge chance of an unexpected death in Karachi, compared to any major metropolitan city in the U.S. Assuming how the percentages were arrived at was fairly accurate, the bottom line, if true, was intriguing: the likelihood of an untimely, unexpected death was similar in the two places. Delving into death rates in Karachi vs. elsewhere was perhaps meant to be an intellectual discourse following the meaningless death of a colleague’s sister in Karachi. Being gunned down outside a famous restaurant after a meal there is hard to rationalize as an expected outcome of a botched cell phone robbery attempt. But this is Karachi. And such occurrences are unfortunately all too frequently heard and shared. Ev...

Illustration / Photo-credit: Saniya Kamal Imagine yourself as an ER nurse or physician. Then imagine a parent bringing to you their dead child, with the expectation that you will bring her back to life. What do you do? This happened to me, yet again. The overhead page for pediatric resuscitation was met with the routine ‘rapid response team’ deploying itself from the pediatric ward to the ER ‘resus’ room. There we met a distraught father who had brought in Sasha, his 2-year-old daughter. Once I took stock of the situation, I realized this was a no brainer: I was to follow the pulseless and apneic child (that is, neither heart nor lungs functioning) algorithm from the American Heart Association’s Pediatric Advanced Life Support guidelines.  “Dead child -> go directly to Cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR) -> do not pass Go, do not collect $200!” a professor from my residency years would remind us, specifically for that situation.   I im...