About me
My first years in college were characterized by indecisiveness, with academic thoughts of engineering, architecture, and biology/pre-med. Social thoughts were much less complicated. I will stick to the academic thoughts for now. I love both science and the humanities, about as much as I love to create things; a maker of sorts. I developed an interest in academics to learn more, aspire to uncover new knowledge, and create new things. Along the way, probably in graduate school, I felt the pull to help others in need. It seems that empathy may be somewhat contagious, as those medical students I shared time with all showed compassion and empathy. I think I had it all along; it was just suppressed until I sorted out what my future might be.
After college, I worked as a diener at a county hospital in a large metropolitan district in Texas and also became an EMT. I then enrolled in a Graduate program. There, I completed a thesis and served as a teacher’s assistant in the anatomy department. I assisted with medical school classes while working toward my graduate degree. I ultimately combined graduate and medical school, finishing graduate work during my medical school training. Graduate school for a Master’s Degree in basic health science (Anatomy) piqued my inquisitive, research-oriented mind; medical school for a D.O. degree further reinforced this empathy for my fellow human beings, i.e., the clinical aspect of applied science. I chose the Osteopathic route because I knew more about that program and because our family used a D.O.; it seemed a logical choice. I have no regrets about pursuing this route and would recommend it, especially for those going into primary care.
Medical training teaches physicians to be independent as well as to work as a team. Thinking under pressure and making decisions based on limited information are skills needed to become a physician. Working with a team of nurses, aides, other physicians, and personnel will forever be a highlight of my working career in clinical medicine. Learning from professors in both graduate school and medical school will forever be appreciated!
How Seacross Ventures and Seacross Medical bag came about
As a practicing physician, I have noticed the accumulation of medical instruments, equipment, sample medications, and medical supplies of all sorts over the years, and, to my frustration, no good way to organize them. Many supplies came from the closing of my office and hospital-based medicine. Reflecting on my past experiences, I had always been somewhat disorganized, which affects others more than it does me. I have a cluttered office and desk, with memorabilia scattered around, each object meaning something to me, bringing me delight. Books upon tables and desks, magazines piled on the floor, all in various states of being read and studied. I can explain that some of this behavior stems from being a person with so many interests. I find that with different projects going on at the same time, completing an organizational task, such as picking up after myself, never rises to the level of importance that it should. But for some reason, that black medical bag, sitting on the floor, open with medical instruments spilling over the top, has always been a source of frustration.
During my clinical years, I was one of a few practicing physicians in my area who actually did house calls and carried the traditional black bag with him on visits. Probably not very efficient as far as keeping regular office hours, but I was not in the business to have an 8-to-5 job. I did what it took for the patient. I had a lot of geriatric patients, homebound and hospice patients as well, located in rural as well as metropolitan areas. On visits, I had to be organized.
The black bag was leather, stiff to open, and had no compartments except for one pouch. It was a required purchase, as I recall, after our entrance into medical school, along with a sphygmomanometer, stethoscope, reflex hammer, sensory testing equipment, and a diagnostic kit. Since those entrance days, multiple other items have found a place in the proverbial black bag. I could have chosen other things, such as a backpack, which I have used on occasion but find too many pockets with no clear identification for the contents; plus, it just didn’t look that professional. I guess enduring those overstuffed lab coat pockets that residents, interns, and, I admit, I had when I worked as a hospitalist fall into the same category of frustrations- a desire for better organization.
The coup de grâce
There was a time when I was trying to find some respite from COVID-19 cases here in Texas. Fearing burnout, I thought there must be a better place to practice, a different type of practice. I found it in the Marshall Islands from a job posting for an Internist. At the time, there were no cases of COVID-19 in the Islands. As it turned out, COVID-19 would raise its ugly head there too.
I jumped at the chance of going there to work. It was the most challenging but best career move I ever made. Having almost completed a 6-month deployment to a military base in the most remote part of the Pacific Ocean, serving as interim Chief Medical Officer and Staff physician of a small critical access hospital, I had to review the equipment for mass-casualty drills and hospital inventory, policies, and procedures. Doing so harkened back to the many other hospitals I had been on staff at, and to reflecting on mass-casualty drills, when on staff in the Emergency Medicine department. There just seemed to be no clear organization of equipment needed at the different stations. The best it seemed was to have multiple clear plastic containers filled to the brim with chest tubes, Foley catheters, bandages, surgical trays, burn kits, etc. The necessary equipment would be there, but the organization of it could have been better, in spite of having a well-thought-out triage system.
The year was 2022; several strains of COVID had come and gone, and the strain, although still lethal, was less virulent than the initial strain. COVID vaccinations were required and being issued. Many deaths were still happening back in the States. The island base in the Marshall Islands, due to the foresight and interdisciplinary and national public health planning for the pandemic, had not yet fully opened its border to the outside world. This, along with a mandatory four, then three weeks of strict quarantine and the required vaccination, forestalled COVID-19 from reaching the Island nation, making it one of the last areas in the world to have the pandemic; a place where no masks were needed outside the quarantined areas. With time, a less virulent strain evolved, knowledge progressed on how to treat the illness and which medicines to use, and the procurement of medications and development of a disaster plan were implemented. When the borders opened, the anticipated surge of cases on the islands happened rapidly as predicted, but fortunately, no deaths from COVID-19 occurred on our island, although the neighboring islands had several. I actually did overestimate the mortality of illness on the island, calculating it from the incidence, prevalence, and case fatality rate numbers from the CDC for the Continental United States (CONUS). We did have our share of morbidity. Several hospitalizations occurred on our island for illness, to support respirations, and to administer Remdesivir while patients were in strict isolation.
We faced multiple challenges during this time, all of which our small medical team confronted head-on with professionalism, dedication, and perseverance. Isolation of multiple ill patients in separate rooms proved to be a potential organizational challenge within our 10-bed critical access hospital. Equipment and supplies were relatively limited. To compound the challenges, toward the end of the surge, only a few nurses, a nurse anesthetist, and I were the medical personnel who did not come down with the illness.
The idea of individual medical kits came to me because of the practice of isolation and quarantine. The ill patients required their own room, monitors, ventilators, and, of course, supplies, instruments, and medications. Individual kits could be made based on room, patient, or illness. The same idea occurred to me during mass-casualty drills, where the “medical kits,” when there was one, could be color-coded after the Stations developed for the degree of trauma, burns, walking wounded, and criticality; not unlike S.A.L.T. triage. For the occupational areas, kits could be portable and standardized to fit different casualty/ treatment stations. It also seemed to be a problem that different occupational areas faced a variety of occupational hazards. Each kit could be stocked with a standard kit to meet OSHA requirements and be expanded in contents based on different scenarios and hazards.
With that background, Seacross Ventures was born as a biomedical research and development company and a site to market the Seacross Medical bag. Other products are in the pipeline for development. The website blog will serve as a means to communicate shared interests, to create an avenue to market other products, and to expand biomedical research and development.
Below is a picture of what some businesses are using for their first aid kit container. It was taken while in the checkout line at a major home improvement store. Although I don’t know what the contents are, I am fairly sure there is room for some improvement.
