The other day I received an urgent phone call that my father was undergoing emergency surgery.  At 80 years old and in very poor health, he suffers from dementia and is very hard of hearing. I took the next flight out and spent the next 72 hours camped out at his bedside and was a ''family'' member.  Actually, as the only son, I ...

 You may find that you're not making enough money as a ''therapist'' in your particular job setting.  If you've checked the median pay scale at similar settings in your area, a setting change might be in order.  I've written a number of times about this topic for Advance, and it bears repeating again and again.  It also beats ...

In all my years of interviewing this has been my favorite question, ''why did you go into respiratory care?''  The answers have been quite interesting too say the least.  They also tell a lot about the person.  Kind of reminds me of Forrest Gump's momma talking about the shoes people wear, tells them were they have been and what ...

Throughout your practice in respiratory care, you meet many different people. It's inevitable, for better or worse, it's something we all realize from our very first patient if not sooner. As I'm sure some more experienced therapists can attest to, eventually there will be a patient that affects the way you work; someone that weighs heavy on the ...

Simple things give our lives meaning and texture. Recently, I was in the NICU with two of my colleagues, Ron and Jason. We were discussing how, on a bad day, the littlest things can turn the entire day around.An example is when my husband sets the coffeemaker. It doesn't sound like a big deal, but when I get up at an unspeakable hour of the ...

A Miami-area doctor was sentenced last week to 41 months in prison for her role in schemes to defraud the Medicare program to the tune of $621,646, according to a news release from the U.S. Department of Justice. A jury convicted the physician of writing prescriptions for medications and durable medical equipment that patients didn't want or ...

Perhaps you've been there before.  You're a department manager in a large academic center in a metropolitan area.  You have vacancy rates in excess of 10 percent, and your hospital just added a new 100-bed critical care tower that will require an additional 12 therapists.  Competing with at least a dozen other hospitals in your ...

President John F. Kennedy's statement ''Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country'' still resonates today.  It asked US citizens to look outside of themselves to fulfill your needs and help others.  There's something to that when it comes to hunting down a raise. Raise ...

Becoming the therapist I want to be often seems like a long impossible road. So I try not to focus on the road or the finish per se; I focus on the small baby steps that are taken that are so important in making me more independent and separating me from that ''new grad student'' mentality. Baby steps, like the first successful unsupervised blood ...

''Clean shirt, new shoes,   and I don't know where I'm goin' to.  Silk suit, Black tie.  I don't need a reason why...''-ZZ Top Does it really matter what we look like when we provide care to our patients as therapist?  I imagine it does not affect the level of care we provide to our patients...or does it?  Over the ...