He answers the door wearing only a button-down shirt and incontinence briefs, no pants, paper towels in one hand, his walker out of reach on the other side of his assisted-living apartment.
“Who are you?” His brow crinkles as his dark eyes bore into me, vacant yet suspicious.
“We met here last month,” I say. I reintroduce myself as his new primary care provider and remind him that he was referred to me by his longtime, beloved clinic-based doctor for home-based primary care.
“Your dad makes wonderful films. They mean a lot to all of us.” I stood there in my N95 mask and safety goggles next to a 97-year-old in memory care on hospice, mouth agape. How did she know my dad was a filmmaker? Was she psychic?
Moments before, she’d been confabulating, making up memories to fill gaps in her knowledge. She was under five feet tall, weighed less than a hundred pounds, and grew up female in America in the 1930s. Yet she told me she’d beat the biggest prizefighter in Philadelphia in a boxing match. The odds of that being true seemed slimmer than her physique, but she was certainly a fighter.
“Are you going to leave me?” my ninety-year-old patient asks me during our home visit. I was summoned because she’s been pressing the call button on her wrist every hour. An overworked nurse in her assisted living sent an exasperated fax, mentioning that all vital signs are stable, no physical symptoms, but the patient complains of “being uncomfortable.” Anxiety is a diagnosis of exclusion I’ve come to exclude.
Are You Going to Leave Me? Read More »
“Are you sleeping with her?” my boss asked his second-in-command, the man who’d hired me. The question was asked about me, in front of me. In front of everybody at work.
He offered to move me laterally—neither up nor down, but sideways, to a different job. At his side.
“How do you do it?” my dear friend asks me. A marriage and family therapist, she finds it hard to hear about the physical ailments of my senior patients—all of them over sixty-five, all homebound due to mobility impairment from a serious illness or injury. “I could never do it,” she says. “With my patients, I help them create new beginnings. For yours, there are none.”
An Unmeasurable Vital Sign Read More »
“There’s always time to check in,” my supervising physician told me the other day, offering to chat about a patient who was not doing well. Would it be unprofessional to tell her that my problem is wishing I’d checked in not with the patient, but with my friend who’s now gone forever?
Always Time To Check In Read More »
From the computer screen a few inches away, Oliver’s honey-brown eyes gazed into mine in the unadulterated way that only children’s eyes can, matching the directness of his question:
“Is he going to die?”
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