Pamela Adelstein, Author at Pulse

Senior Center

3 Comments / Motor Vehicle Accidents / Pamela Adelstein

The constraints of traditional marital roles put Rita at a disadvantage when she was unexpectedly widowed in her 80s. Finances, cars, and home repairs had been her husband’s purview. But Rita was determined to learn to manage her own affairs, despite her grief.

Her learning curve was steep and her missteps frequent. She initially needed reminders not to pay bills set up for autopay. Duped by scammers, Rita had to cancel credit cards and open new bank accounts a few times. After learning the art of the screenshot, she frequently texted photos of mail to her daughter with a query: “Scam?”

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The Night Fairy and the Mama Bear

2 Comments / Nursing / Pamela Adelstein

My seventh-grade social studies teacher posed a question: “Which professions are the most important?” We know-it-all adolescents shouted “Doctor!” “Lawyer!” “Accountant!” My teacher’s answer is seared into my memory: “Farmers, parents, teachers, nurses.” I was dumbfounded; my world paradigm shifted.

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Home of the Free

3 Comments / Disability / Pamela Adelstein

Today as a family physician I am disabled in a way that I never could have dreamed in 1997 when I joyfully marched across the magnificent auditorium stage. I wore an ostentatious maroon gown and a green velvet sash, an enormous smile and relaxed shoulders. I shook the presenter’s hand and took hold of my diploma. Four years of delayed gratification, hundreds of thousands of dollars, countless late nights and long days culminated in this moment. The camera shutter in my soul CLICKED eagerly to capture it all.

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Unwelcome Citizens?

Leave a Comment / Immigrants / Pamela Adelstein

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.

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Candy Striper, circa 1985

2 Comments / Dementia / Pamela Adelstein

As a teenager I donned a cheap polyester red-and-white striped smock, pantyhose, and a white blouse, and officially became a candystriper at a local hospital.

I offloaded tasks from hospital employees whose skills were needed elsewhere. I compliantly carried unbagged urine specimens with my bare hands from patient floors to the lab, pre-universal precautions. How gross in retrospect. I delivered flowers to patient rooms, dropped off meal trays, and refilled bedside water pitchers.

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The Heartbreaking Question

2 Comments / Bravery / Pamela Adelstein

The unspoken question looms. I might ask first, dropping a bomb that disrupts the medical visit. Or the patient asks at the appointment’s conclusion, when I query, “Anything else today?” Patient concerns brought up when their visit has ostensibly ended are dubbed “doorknob questions.” Previously, these were predictably about Viagra or vaginas. Since the November 2024 election results, my patients voice their terror that access to gender-affirming medical care will cease to exist.

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Birth Story

Leave a Comment / Birth / Pamela Adelstein

When my now-grown children were babies sleeping, my husband and I quipped as drunken smiles spread across their faces, “Womb.” When their sleepy smiles faded and they whimpered and pouted we commented, “Birth canal.”

As a family physician who has “delivered” hundreds of babies (medical speak for attending a birth), I consider myself well appraised of the uterus and vagina of a person in labor. I have wiped away blood, amniotic fluid, meconium, vomitus, stool and urine. I have touched tissues and instrumented bodily orifices.

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Rapid Mobilization

4 Comments / Recovering / Pamela Adelstein

Since November 6, 2024, nothing has been routine for health care providers like me who proudly provide gender-affirming health care to trans and gender-diverse people. Now, every medical visit is marked with a pregnant pause after I enter the exam room, say hello, and ask how the patient is today . . . after which each patient expresses their profound fears and anxieties about whether they will be able to continue to get the care they need to be healthy and safe. My clinical sessions are packed with patients, and discussions such as these need time and attention, so now I run more behind than ever.

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Sex Ed

Leave a Comment / Getting Motivated / Pamela Adelstein

Behind the closed door of the exam room, patients always hesitate in a predictable manner before asking uncomfortable questions. As the visit winds down, they finally summon their courage and inquire. We providers recognize this scenario, having witnessed it countless times before. Perhaps the patients sense us relaxing into the familiar and feel briefly encouraged to proceed.

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Aging in America

1 Comment / Palliative and Hospice Care / Pamela Adelstein

A dentist friend once mused that people should be born with a third set of teeth that would erupt late in life, since our permanent teeth evolved at a time when humans’ life expectancy was shorter and thus they wear in midlife. Imagine the Tooth Fairy visiting us in our sixties!

Since that conversation, I’ve pondered how long our bodies are meant to last. As a family physician, I wonder whether medical advances have set up some body parts to fail prematurely. I’m deeply saddened that societal structures have evolved minimally to keep pace with the way we now age.

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Watching for Survival

5 Comments / A Turn for the Better / Pamela Adelstein

While I was driving to work on a sunny Friday morning many years ago, the opening music for the StoryCorps broadcast streamed from the radio. I raised the volume and listened. A daughter asked her father how he’d made it out of a psychiatric hospital where he received shock treatments. He had been committed for insanity at age 22. He replied simply that he watched television to see how “normal” people acted and mimicked what he saw. Eventually, the staff released him.

The interview ended. I lowered the volume on the radio and reflected on this man’s smarts and the deplorable state of inpatient mental health in the 1960s. And then I started bawling.

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Stalemate

2 Comments / Regrets/No Regrets / Pamela Adelstein

Once I looked forward to his visits, but years later I dreaded them. My change of heart began after he was laid off from his janitorial position. He worked diligently, applying desperately for jobs, but the economy was slow, and no one was hiring. The stress of not being able to make ends meet was crushing. His blood pressure rose, and he grew angry and depressed.

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

Pamela Adelstein