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

Sara Lynne Wright

The Instigator

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.

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Waves

“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.

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Are You Going to Leave Me?

“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.

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