A message from our Editor > Farah Karipineni, MD
Spring is a time to celebrate growth
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Farah Karipineni, MD, MPH, is board certified in General Surgery and fellowship trained in Endocrine Surgery. She is currently practicing in Fresno as an Assistant Clinical Professor for UCSF. Dr. Karipineni earned her medical degree from University of California, Irvine School of Medicine. Her residency in General Surgery was completed at Albert Einstein Medical Center, and she completed her fellowship in Endocrine Surgery at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Dr Karipineni has been published in journals including The American Surgeon, the International Journal of Surgery and the Journal of Surgical Education.
Spring 2021
Spring is a time to celebrate growth. It conjures up images of new blooms, baby chicks appearing in nests, and animals emerging from hibernation. But while growth is generally seen as a positive thing, it is, paradoxically, not always desired or even welcome. We tend to settle into the familiar groove of our routine, and when something comes along to push us off our comfortable tracks, it can be a fairly traumatic experience. The past year or so has been a testament to this, wherein we have been stretched and tested and worn out in ways we never hoped to be. But for those of us alive and lucky enough to still be breathing oxygen into our lungs, we can look back at how far we have been forced to grow, and all that we have overcome along the way. We may even see, in hindsight, that some of that growth was necessary or beneficial, though we would never have chosen its rocky path of our own accord. In medicine, we see patients living this out on a daily basis. Those of us who practice inpatient medicine see patients at their nadir. Not only are they suffering from whatever brought them into the hospital, but in the times of Covid, they are doing so with no social support. Whether it’s the 81-year-old Spanish speaking cervical cancer survivor with a small bowel obstruction, the 20-year-old paraplegic from a motor vehicle crash, or the breastfeeding new mother with CENTRAL VALLEY PHYSICIANS 7
