after all this grief
after all this grief Read More »
May 2025
A Final Concert in the PICU
I learned of Alex’s death from an attending physician in UCLA’s division of pediatric hematology-oncology, where I was a second-year resident. We were in the middle of rounds, and upon hearing the news, our team grew somber.
“Alex passed peacefully, surrounded by her family and friends,” the attending told us. “Her family wants to thank the medical team for their care and support.”
Alex had been transferred to our pediatric intensive-care unit (PICU) for acute respiratory failure; she needed sedation, a breathing tube and blood-pressure support.
She was only twenty years old, an undergraduate at an East Coast university.
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A Rotten Apple
I fell, and I didn’t think I’d be able to get back up.
I’m not even sure I wanted to. But I did. Bruised. Broken. Not done.
Outside, I was rough—scarred, dented, not the kind of thing anyone wanted to look at, much less carry home. I wasn’t shiny or firm. I wasn’t fresh. I was a rotten apple.
Unwelcome Citizens?
We physicians sign a mind-boggling number of forms. One of my favorites is an attestation that a person’s gender marker has changed, which allows them to change their gender marker on official documents. (Although I question why this is delegated to medical providers.) It is an honor to play a role in someone’s gender affirmation. When signing I pause to acknowledge the joy, significance and sanctity of this moment.
Unwelcome Citizens? Read More »
Keeping Vigil
Here, in this place where time refracts and sleep/wake cycles are no match for fluorescent lights and incessant telemetry alarms, you exist in a liminal space.
You are neither here nor there, clinically tenuous at best. Your stick-and-poke smiley face tattoos — the first things I noticed when I admitted you not long ago – are a foil to the reality of your situation. Decompensated cirrhosis. Multi-pressor shock. No loved ones at bedside.
Medicine Without a Bottle
Editor’s Note: May is National Nurses Month.
When is hope medicine?
In the middle of the night, a woman’s feet quietly whisked across the hospital floor to my bed.
I was seventeen, grieving the death of my mother by suicide, and the loss of our family unit. I was the oldest, doing my best to keep everything and everyone together. My stepfather was absent, spending most of his time drinking at Lex’s Lounge. My younger siblings alternated between staying at home or with our grandparents. By all accounts, it was a confusing chapter in our lives.
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Being Different: My Struggle and My Motivation
Hearing her mother say that doctors “don’t care about people like us” motivated her to become a nurse…
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Perfume for No One
When we moved to this house, the outdoor space excited us the most, and we were constantly there. It was a first for us, and a luxury where we live. The garden provided an escape that I never had before: the illusion of leaving something behind.
Like everything in life, the novelty of the garden wore off. The gardeners we hired often spent more time there than we did. Perpetually manicured, it remained beautiful, but undisturbed and underappreciated.
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Wet skin
My mother doesn’t think she’s dying,
but she’s in the ER for the third time
in less than three months while
I’m 2,500 miles away on an island
in the middle of the sea, my sister
sitting with our shrinking mother
Patient Identification
As a family doc myself, I sought care with a family physician for my family and myself. We’d moved to a major metropolitan area, and I chose a family medicine group affiliated with a small hospital in the city, the same group and hospital who’d attended me for my first childbirth. The hospital’s historic mission was to care for poor patients, many of whom were recent immigrants.
In my new, more affluent urban neighborhood, I joined a support group of new mothers. We were all white and all but me were planning to give birth at “name brand” tertiary medical centers. But having done my residency in a community hospital, I felt comfortable getting my care at one and had every confidence in the staff; the truth was, they’d saved my life when my first son was born.
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