By Jessica Zitter I received an uncharacteristically anxious text from my friend Aileen: “I am having an emergency with my Mom. Please call ASAP.” When I last talked to Aileen, her mother’s dementia had been worsening slowly. A little more confusion, a stovetop left burning after cooking a meal. But now, her mother was significantly more agitated and paranoid—pacing the [...]
By Jessica Zitter It took me a while to notice the hummingbird. She must have flown by my window 5 or 6 times before registering in my peripheral vision. When I finally looked up, I saw her standing on a tiny branch of the Monterey Pine outside our second-floor home-office window, a mere 3 feet from my desk. She [...]
After 'Caregiver: A Love Story' wrapped in March 2020, Dr. Jessica Zitter — who co-directed the short with Kevin Gordon — the world "shut down" and the duo feared the work would never see the light of day. In March 2020, a documentary short I co-directed with filmmaker Kevin Gordon, Caregiver: A Love Story, wrapped. But all of our plans — [...]
Dr. Jessica Zitter Published in STAT “Why do they have that cold steel on my son’s ankle?” The father of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man who was newly paralyzed from the waist down, wanted to know why his son was shackled to his hospital bed. Jacob Blake had been shot in the back seven times by police in Kenosha, Wis., [...]
Dr. Jessica Zitter Published in The New York Times In March 2019, a robot entered a patient’s room in California and a doctor on its screen told him and his granddaughter that he was dying. This experience, posted to the granddaughter’s Facebook page, was treated as a scandal. Newscasters questioned the humanity of a health care system that would do [...]
My friend Jim called me with urgency in his voice; his elderly father, living alone in New York City during the peak of the pandemic, had a multiday fever and was losing weight. He wanted to know, should he take him to the hospital? My typical response in this case — sudden illness in an otherwise healthy person — would [...]
By Jessica Nutik Zitter, M.D. April 16, 2020 My phone rang with a FaceTime video, and my cousin’s face popped into view. We spent the first few minutes expressing our mutual disbelief and shock over Covid-19, acknowledging the insanity and underlying terror of these unprecedented circumstances. We joked about how our anxious mothers, with their endless reminders of dressing warm and [...]
My patient would never breathe on his own again, but he didn’t know it yet. Years of smoking landed him in our emergency room several times a month. Now the only thing lying between him and the grave was a breathing machine. As his I.C.U. doctor, I had done everything possible to liberate him from the ventilator. Nothing had worked. Whenever [...]
Jessica Zitter, MD, MPH Harvard Business Review I recently stood in front of a group of emergency room residents at my hospital and asked an unusual question. “Has any of you ever judged your attending physician for not trying hard enough to save a patient’s life?” Then I looked around the room. But like every time I’d given [...]
This undated photo provided by the Maynard family shows Brittany Maynard. The terminally ill California woman moved to Portland, Ore., to take advantage of Oregon's Death with Dignity Act, which was established in the 1990s. Maynard wants to pass a similar law in California and has turned to advocacy in her final days. (AP Photo/Maynard Family) Photo: Courtesy Maynard [...]
