by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Apr 16, 2021 | Fight the Good Fight
This is a healthy teenager who underwent podiatric surgery for a tarsal coalition 6 months ago. Sutures were removed a month later and two weeks after that, a small opening along the surgical incision began to drain copious amounts of “egg yolk” colored...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Apr 15, 2021 | Fight the Good Fight, Uncategorized
I ask my nurses to leave the discarded dressings on top of the trashcan so that I can have a look at them. There’s a lot you can learn from used dressings. I am worried about the fact that drainage can be copious despite compression, that patients on oral...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Apr 14, 2021 | Do the Right Thing: Thoughts on Quality, Fight the Good Fight, US Wound Registry
This is a young man in his 20’s who is a quadraplegic and suffered a bowel obstruction about 6 months before this photograph was taken. The midline abdominal wound is granulated, but still hasn’t epithelialized. Why? There’s no pressure over this area and it doesn’t...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Apr 13, 2021 | Fight the Good Fight
We don’t talk enough about the relationship between sleep apnea and lower extremity edema. A lot of patients fall asleep while I am talking to them, and I don’t think the problem is my personality. Edema is THE most common diagnosis we see in the outpatient...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Apr 11, 2021 | Miscellaneous Musings
I’m a caregiver instead of a doctor this weekend and noticing all the small frustrations of being a patient. Is it too much to ask that the tables roll and the vanity comes out? (The second nurse who tried said, “Oh honey we never try to use the food tray...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Apr 5, 2021 | Fight the Good Fight
Join us Thursday, April 8, 2021 from 5:30 – 7:30 PM EST for the second installment of Virtual Wound Rounds, in partnership with SAWC. The topic is “The Dressing Debate Part II: Advanced Dressings – Why and When?” The webinar is free! All you...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Apr 2, 2021 | COVID-19
Still trying to decide whether to get vaccinated against COVID-19? If you think you have brain fog and fatigue NOW… A new study by Graham and colleagues, published online in Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology provides more chilling data about the...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Mar 31, 2021 | COVID-19
A recent study published in JAMA discusses how Covid-19 affects the brain. In addition to losing one’s sense of smell (which is an effect on the nerve that enables you to smell), there are cognitive and attention deficits like “brain fog,” new-onset anxiety,...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Mar 30, 2021 | Fight the Good Fight, Health Information Technology and Wound Care
There’s increasing interest in Vitamin D. I became focused on this after a series of patients who failed to heal operative wounds. I found their Vitamin D-OH levels were in the teens (in some cases, single digits) when 30 is the lowest value we want for wound healing....
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Mar 16, 2021 | COVID-19
For many years I kept the postcard above, depicting The Eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, taped to my bathroom mirror. Painted by Pierre-Jacques Volaire in 1777, it depicts the cataclysmic day in 79 A.D. when the ancient Roman city of Pompeii was buried under a thick carpet...
