GIVE THE GIFT OF PULSE

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

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fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

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GIVE THE GIFT OF PULSE

June 2017

Two Years and a Shadow

Leave a Comment / Miracles /

Just a shadow over two years ago, my parents’ lives shattered when old age carried deep illness into their home and broke everything into shards. Those shards will be with us forever. They will, I fear, be visited upon seven upon seven generations of sons and daughters and nurses and doctors and therapists and priests and aides and friends, seven generations to come.

The miracle is that we are still here, two years plus a shadow on from that nightmare time.

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Alloimmune

Leave a Comment / Miracles /
“I only have bad options for you.”

I had visited this place, this stifling humid ultrasound room, a thousand times in my fears. But now it was real, and I had a choice to make. All the grinning, stupid hope I had embraced, the idea that this was a walk of faith I could use to teach others, rose up as a dark maroon flush in my chest. Hubris. The ancient Greek kind.

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Saving Private Ryan

21 Comments / Stories /

Gregory Rutecki

The late Eighties was the worst of times in medical education–the era when doctors in training worked a virtually unlimited number of hours each week. This unceasing and inhumane workload led residents, understandably, to view patients purely as collections of physical ailments.

Back then, I was an attending physician at a community teaching hospital. One day, as usual, I was preparing to make morning rounds and, simultaneously, to do my best to teach my team of internal-medicine residents.

Fourteen patients awaited us, every one of them quite sick. As my team and I proceeded from one bedside to the next, struggling to cram the patient interviews into ever-dwindling snippets of time, I felt a familiar sense of growing pressure; it was a struggle to focus fully on each patient.

Despite this, our last patient’s chart notes grabbed my complete attention.

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How Did He Just Wake Up?

2 Comments / Miracles /

I hung up the phone in shock. I never felt so helpless.

My brother was lying in a deep coma in a Bronx hospital, and none of his nine siblings were in America. My parents were dead, and the closest relative was my mom’s brother who lived in Canada. He had already booked a flight to New York for the same night.

Sitting in a village in Saudi Arabia, where I worked as a community health nurse, I cried and prayed.

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The Sign

Leave a Comment / Miracles /

Give, give, give–what is the point of having experience, knowledge, or talent if I don’t give it away? Of having stories if I don’t tell them to others?… It is in giving that I connect with others, with the world, and with the divine.

–Isabel Allende

My office at the hospital is not unusual. Amid the clutter there are several special mementos and notes received from patients and families over the years. Each one holds a story, brought back to life when I touch it again.

A few years ago, the sister of a long-term patient stopped by with a framed picture. We talked about her brother and his long battle with his cancer.

He had spent his career working for the city repairing street lights and signs. While in the prime of his life, he had developed a tongue cancer. After an initially successful surgical removal followed by radiation therapy, he developed a recurrence. Over the following months, the cancer had grown and spread. Eventually, there were no more options. He found peace and prepared for the end of his life.

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Blessed Events

Leave a Comment / Miracles /

Although I do not believe in medical miracles, I rejoice in the reality that I have experienced two—when I became pregnant with (and ultimately gave birth to) first my son and then my daughter.

From the age of thirteen-and-a-half, when I began menstruating, until age eighteen, I endured a great deal of pain whenever I got my period. My parents took me to the gynecologist, but he did nothing but assure me that “this too shall pass” with time.

Unfortunately, he was wrong. 

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Ocean Memories

Ocean Memories

7 Comments / visuals /
Pris Campbell 
About the artist: 
Formerly a clinical psychologist, Pris Campbell was sidelined by ME/CFS (myalgic encephalopathy/chronic fatigue syndrome) in 1990. “I now write poetry and create graphics in this much quieter life, publishing eight books of poetry through small-press publishers. I live in the Greater West Palm Beach area with my husband and two cats.”
About the artwork:
“As former sailor, I find the sea a place of joy and healing. A photograph of a couple strolling the beach, taken during a weekend in Daytona, became not just this walk, in my mind, but multiple walks, the energy from previous ones accompanying them, enhancing their experience.”
Visuals editor:

Sara Kohrt

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