Patient care kudos go to our S9 Care Team on the Tinsley Service. For the past month, they cared for a Hispanic patient with metastatic cancer who required oxygen but didn’t qualify for outpatient care due to his immigration status. Knowing end of life was imminent, everyone worked valiantly to reunite this patient with his family in Mexico. The advocacy was remarkable and multi-disciplinary, involving residents William Moore, MD, Michael Osunsanmi, MD, and Sarah Marucci, MD; S9 leaders Kelley Williams, RN, and Martin Rodriguez, MD; social worker Kalyn Burgio; and James Willig, MD, who frequently acted as a translator. In a heart wrenching twist, the patient didn’t live to make the trip home. Nevertheless, we are terrifically inspired by the depth and breadth of compassion that all who were involved demonstrated for this patient. 

Michelle Harris, a Chicago teenager with a rare multisystem autoimmune disease known as granulomatosis with polyangiitis, became a UAB patient on Christmas Eve. When she arrived, Michelle was receiving maximal support on a ventilator, and she was transitioned to ECMO so she could regain enough strength to undergo a lung transplant. Nearly 100 days later, she left the hospital, without undergoing the transplant! Read the full story here.

Marie Bakitas, DNSc, NP-C, FAAN (Gerontology, Geriatrics, and Palliative Care) received the Hospice and Palliative Nurses Association’s Distinguished Researcher Award and the Hospice and Palliative Nurses Foundation/Project on Death in America Nursing Leadership Award at the recent American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine conference in Chicago.

A single leaf working alone provides no shade. As we rush headlong into spring, when the trees around us are putting on a fresh wardrobe of green, will you consider branching out in support of our UAB family and the community around us? Your gift to the UAB Benevolent Fund is combined with others across UAB Medicine to support over 120 charitable organizations, including the Employee Emergency Assistance Fund. Giving is easy. Set up a payroll deduction. Buy lunch at the Food Truck Festival on Friday, April 8. Join the Habitat House build in the fall. And just imagine what a single leaf can do, working together!

Catapulted by his rousing Medical Grand Rounds lecture, Eric Judd, MD (Nephrology) recently led a crack team of UAB nephrologists to defeat and escape from the Casino Royale room at Breakout Birmingham. Judd particularly excelled at the roulette wheel, where he bet on black and earned valuable time points for the team.

Coming next week to Medical Grand Rounds: There will be a Clinical Pathology Conference with a unique case from our Tinsley Service presented by Sarah French, MD. Martin Rodriguez, MD, will moderate with a panel of experts.”

Do you have Good News to share? If so, please email the Department of Medicine's Director of Communications, Carolyn Walsh.

View This Week's Slides Here.