He said he wanted to talk to me. He asked for me by name. He was seated in the waiting room, a lone pale face in a room full of brown faces. I asked my medical assistant to query him as to why he was there, while I continued to see patients; he told her he had something to give me—something he could give only to me.
Dr. Neil called me. She needed stat labs for an elderly patient, June.
“Esther,” Dr. Neil explained to me, “a few days ago, June took three Lisinoprils, three Metoprolols, and three aspirins, all on the same day!”
Shocked, I asked, “She didn’t bottom out or have a heart block?”
“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.”
My body resists most medications. I had my first allergic reaction at age 20, breaking out in hives from head to toe as I stood in a post-game locker room. I don’t recall the infection I had, but the pill I’d been prescribed to treat it was penicillin. Since then, my allergy list has expanded to include almost all antibiotics except Bactrim, Flagyl, and Macrobid. I also get heartburn from baby aspirin, itching from Vicodin, and dizziness from steroids.
The current daily medication regimen for a lot of people with HIV involves one pill. Granted, there are several drugs in that one pill; they’re all lumped in there together to make it easier for people to comply with the requirement that they take all their meds, every single day. Still, there’s a part of me that can hardly believe it. One pill. One pill! And it actually keeps people healthy!
I take two medications. One is Armour Thyroid, as I can’t tolerate the usual thyroid medication. The other addresses symptoms of a neuroimmune disease I’ve had for years—allowing me to endure sound and light and stopping the minor seizures I had when I was subjected to those two things. Those meds help me, and I am grateful for them. But the problem is that I can tolerate almost no other medication that doctors have suggested.
Round bottles of pills fill one shelf of my medicine cabinet. Only one bottle contains a rather harmless drug: a prescription pill used to fight nausea; that bottle tends to stay full for a long time. The other bottles hold stronger drugs: one for my hypothyroidism; two to reduce my anxiety and stress and allow me to sleep at night; and one, the largest one, whose contents somewhat alleviate the chronic head pain I have suffered for almost two decades due to five jaw surgeries.
Dear Pulse readers,
An elderly patient walks into an appointment with her new doctor and empties a bag of medications on the doctor’s desk.
The doctor looks at the heap of bottles and says, “I have some good news for you! I’m going to take you off of all these pills except for three.”
“Doctor, that’s wonderful!” the patient exclaims. “Which three should I keep taking?”
Having a purpose in life is as critical to one’s well-being as food and shelter. I’ve learned, over my 25 years of doctoring, that a sense of purpose both helps us develop our identity—our sense of self—and connects us to something greater than ourselves.
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.
“From dust we came, and to dust we shall return,” she whispered to me. Her face brightened up her compact 80-square-foot room. I held her hand, decorated with jewels from all around the world. She had just been transferred here from another memory care facility, and I’d decided to sit down with her every Sunday. Stacked in her lap were a Bible, a devotional book, and a journal. “What do you write in there?” I asked, pointing to the beaded journal.
I feel like a salmon swimming upstream, constantly fighting the current: the current of a system designed to dehumanize students, residents, and patients—a system in which “health” and “care” are often afterthoughts, while profits and media image take precedence.
