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Dr. Travis Ulmer

Four Strategies for Becoming a Great Attending

My first six months as an attending were frightening. I would drive to my shifts with the radio on, but I couldn’t really enjoy it. I was thinking about all the things that could go wrong. The truth was I didn’t know if I could handle the unknown. I was hypersensitive to the idea that […]

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As Go Your Relationships, So Goes Your Resiliency

We hear a lot about how your work can affect your personal relationships, usually for the worse. In fact, I wrote about how cynicism at work can negatively affect your relationships at home in a recent column. This is a well-worn topic in emergency medicine, and there are a lot of strategies to deal with it. Go […]

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The Exact Moment When I Realized I Needed To Change

A fellow resident and I were working a busy Monday shift, and I was walking by the room where he was seeing a patient when I heard him say, “Let me step out for a moment.” He came out, quickly closed the curtain, flexed his fists, sucked in some air, held it, and finally blew […]

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Answering the Call at Summa Health’s Residency Program

As emergency medicine physicians, we have more or less self-selected careers in which we “answer the call” when we are needed. Even so, this was not the kind of call I was expecting while on winter vacation with my family and friends. In the days just after Christmas this past December, I was in Hocking Hills […]

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Life After Residency: It’s Time to Focus on You

It’s that time for senior residents to stop. Just stop. Breathe. Relax (a little). Most of you will have signed a contract for your first job as an attending physician, and now it’s time to stop and smell the roses. I vividly remember when I signed my first contract. It was nearly a decade ago, […]

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New Graduates: Take the Long View

Four years ago, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine. We had graduated residency the same year and our careers had taken us to different parts of the country. It was ACEP 2012. We’d been mingling with old friends and current colleagues, and the conversation turned to kids. I told him my […]

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