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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Karen E. Lasser

La Stessa Zuppa

Leave a Comment / Bravery /

A few days ago, I received an Orwellian email about my National Institute of Health (NIH) biosketch from the director of an NIH-funded research center at my institution. We are submitting an application for renewal of our funding, and all mentions of health disparities, health inequities, low-income patients, and safety-net hospitals were highlighted on my biosketch with a request that I delete them.

I responded to my colleague’s e-mail, “Sure, I’ll do it (with some  reluctance, horrible to have to do this).” I didn’t want to jeopardize my institution’s (and my) funding, so I edited out the undesirable language where I could. But I couldn’t change the titles of my publications dating back to 1995, such as  “Health Disparities in the US and Canada: Results of a Cross-National Population-Based Survey.” I’m now feeling complicit, perhaps even compromised. Am I a coward for whitewashing my NIH biosketch?

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One of Our Favorites

Leave a Comment / Connections /

When I received a message from one of our clinic nurses that Mr. R had passed away, at age 82, I called his house, spoke to his wife and son, and expressed my condolences. I learned that he’d gone quickly, from fast-moving pneumonia. The day was drizzly, the clouds dark, and I was reminded of a Baudelaire poem I’d read in high school: “Quand le ciel bas et lourd pèse comme un couvercle sur l’esprit…” (“When the low, heavy sky weighs like a lid on the spirit…”).

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Personal Days

Leave a Comment / Finding Balance /

This week, our resident clinic was decimated. The interns were out on a “personal week”-the week between first and second year of residency.  One of our senior residents was on maternity leave, and the three remaining residents were all taking a “personal day” here and there to a attend a funeral, visit a sick grandmother, etc. My co-preceptor, realizing we would not need two preceptors this week, had taken a few days of vacation. Which left me with two new interns, eager and enthusiastic to learn, and my senior resident on her last day of clinic.

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Quasi Niente

4 Comments / Regrets/No Regrets /

On Wednesdays, one of the residents in my clinic precepting group usually presents a didactic. However, last Wednesday, the junior resident was absent, and I decided to present a case of a “challenging patient” instead. The patient himself wasn’t really challenging, I explained to the residents, but he was in a challenging situation. I had a 20-minute telemedicine session the following day, and I wanted the residents’ advice on how I should best spend my time with the patient.

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Only 50%: A Failing Grade for a Pharmacy Chain

2 Comments / Pills /

Due to the war in the Middle East, my family and I had to cancel a much-anticipated visit to Israel this holiday season. Instead, we decided to fly to Bogota. My late father grew up in Colombia, but I’ve never been there; we hope to visit my great-grandmother’s grave and my father’s old neighborhood.

Given constantly evolving infectious risks, we made an appointment before our departure for my older daughter to visit an infectious diseases specialist. The physician sent prescriptions for acetazolamide (for altitude sickness) and azithromycin (for traveler’s diarrhea) to a local pharmacy—part of the country’s largest chain.

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It Finally Happened

Leave a Comment / COVID-19 /

It finally happened. Three years and four months after the pandemic began, I contracted COVID-19.

I wore a mask longer than most anyone I know. I dutifully received all the booster shots. I was headed to Brazil on a family vacation and decided it was time to relinquish the mask. My teenage daughters had been making fun of me for months. I was more worried about dengue, yellow fever, and zika as I slapped mosquitos buzzing around my ankles on my daily walk by the ocean at the idyllic beach resort of Buzios, a several-hour drive from Rio de Janeiro.

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La Emergencia

2 Comments / Emergencies /

A stereotypical pathologist, my father was a man of few words and fewer friends. He spent long days in solitude with his microscope, examining tissues and cells. In 1982, almost 20 years before his own diagnosis with metastatic breast cancer, he published a rare case in which breast cancer cells invaded individual chest muscle fibers. He later examined his own breast biopsy.

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The Gift of a Botched Surgery

1 Comment / Surgery /

When I was fifteen, I attended a summer music camp with my cello. One evening, during a capture-the-flag game, the boy I was chasing fell. I tripped over him, breaking my tibia and bending my fibula. Two surgeries later at a small community hospital in Maine (external reductions to avoid scars), my shin was dented. To this day, my left leg is shorter than my right, and I walk on the outside of my left foot with a limp.

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