Sara Ann Conkling, Author at Pulse

Not the Prescription I Expected

Leave a Comment / Guts / Sara Ann Conkling

As I think back on that morning over 40 years ago, I’m pretty sure he was a medical student. I had come to the clinic weeks before after experiencing a sharp, intermittent pain in my stomach; I’d felt sure it was something that needed to be fixed. In part because I was attending a university with a well-known medical school, I’d been offered several tests to try to figure out what was wrong. All of the results were negative.

So now I found myself sitting across a table from a medical student who still had all of his curiosity and empathy intact. “Tell me a little about your life,” he said.

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Naked and Seething

Leave a Comment / The Exam Room / Sara Ann Conkling

I should have paid attention to Red Flag Number One, which was having to provide my insurance information four times. Twice is normal—once when making the appointment and again when you show up for it. Four times is excessive; that was my first clue.

I also blew past Red Flag Number Two, which was the most dark, dismal, uncomfortable waiting room I’d visited in years. Patients were crammed into uncomfortable chairs with little to no space between them. Everyone in the room looked stressed and unhappy.

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“You’re Early . . .”

1 Comment / Hospitalized / Sara Ann Conkling

The year was 2008, and I was hospitalized for extensive pre-op testing. Awaiting me was a long and risky operation to try to save part of my left kidney. A well-meaning but errant interventional radiologist had ablated it with alcohol. Not just once, but twice!

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A First Trip to the Doctor

Leave a Comment / Immigrants / Sara Ann Conkling

For one year in the mid-1980s, I was the concert manager in a music department at a major university. A friend of mine who taught there had called me in a panic when their concert manager quit in the middle of the school year. The university had 10 performing ensembles and about 15 different concert venues spread all over the metropolitan area of the city.

The job was impossible, and it came with zero support staff. Out of desperation, I talked the department chair into assigning me a couple of graduate assistants. Chi Shing and Li Ching showed up right on time the next Monday, speaking almost no English. They were gifted composers and very willing workers.

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A Parting Gift of Motivation

1 Comment / Getting Motivated / Sara Ann Conkling

Joe is deaf when he isn’t wearing his hearing aids. So he didn’t hear my crutches behind him on the floor at 2:00 a.m. when I got out of bed for a drink of water. We’d just returned from a beautiful Mediterranean cruise. The day before our flight back to the U.S., I’d slipped on a wet staircase and torn the anterior cruciate ligament in my left knee. Surgery was successful and my rehab was going well.

But apparently my relationship wasn’t going so well. As I walked up behind Joe, I saw that he was on my laptop, corresponding with a woman on a dating site.

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It’s Not What You Think

Leave a Comment / Scars / Sara Ann Conkling

I remember the first time I saw the long, scraggly line on top of my forearm. “It looks great,” I lied. The dermatology resident sat across from me, having just uncovered the wound left by his first surgery. As we both stared at it, I was remembering the roomful of people who’d surrounded my gurney, scrutinizing every move he made as he excised my skin cancer. I had felt sorry for him at the time. It was too big an audience for his first excision. So I was determined to be kind now.

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That First COVID Shot

Leave a Comment / COVID Redux / Sara Ann Conkling

When COVID immunizations first became available in Florida, I was up three nights in a row scheduling shots for elderly members of my tiny church’s congregation. I knew they would not be able to cope with the technology to schedule their own shots online. And even if they could, none would have the patience and persistence to keep entering their data each time the portal failed.

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Not Such a Tough Call

Leave a Comment / Tough Calls / Sara Ann Conkling

Earlier this year, my beloved family practice doctor retired. Over many years, I had had ample opportunity to appreciate his diagnostic skill, his professionalism and his kindness. Moreover, I felt I could always trust that he would respect my wishes. I had a real partner in my health care.

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The Most Important Person in the Room

Leave a Comment / Bedside Manner / Sara Ann Conkling

No one tells you when you are having surgery that the surgeon is not the most important person in the room. In terms of safety, it’s the anesthesiologist. I learned this the hard way.

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Please Keep Your Narcotics

1 Comment / Pills / Sara Ann Conkling

“That isn’t Tylenol.”

It had taken more than half an hour for the nurse to arrive at my bedside with the pills I’d asked for, following my grueling four-and-a-half-hour surgery. I had finally been wheeled into a hospital room at midnight, had pushed my call button, had asked for Tylenol, and then had waited.

“What is this?” I asked, as I handed the pills back to the nurse. The color drained from her face. “It’s pain medication,” she said. “I brought you pain medication.”

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Solitude Interrupted, Thankfully

3 Comments / Alone / Sara Ann Conkling

I knew the private room at the busy teaching hospital was a rare luxury.

I had spent the entire day having invasive and uncomfortable tests; I was in the hospital because my left kidney had been partially destroyed by an interventional radiologist who had failed to distinguish between a renal cyst and a renal diverticulum. Thus my left kidney had been ablated with alcohol—twice. I was in pain, infected, and bleeding internally.

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The Price of Prevention

5 Comments / Suicide / Sara Ann Conkling

It was Mother’s Day and my neighbors had invited me out to brunch. The two of them had met in a diner in New York where Mary was the server and he was a conductor on the railroad. I met them when they decided to retire to Florida and bought the condo next door.

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

Sara Ann Conkling