My routine clinic day was interrupted by a startling message. During a moment of extreme stress, a long-term patient of mine left a threatening voicemail on my colleague’s phone. The target of her anger was me. It was difficult to discern her garbled speech in the recording of her screaming, but I heard loud and clear that she intended to find me at my clinic and physically hurt me – or worse.
I had just returned from my parish of ministry. Little did I think I would not be returning to my office. Visiting the homebound in person was to become a way of the past. COVID-19 had raised its ugly head and my life would never be the same.
During my psychiatry clerkship, I encountered a patient with his first primary psychotic episode. He was an African-American immigrant, and his story hit many of my buttons. I connected with him as his journey brought back memories, and I was moved to read up on various studies surrounding his case. I found an article that hypothesized that immigrants from underdeveloped countries had a higher chance of mental illness due to “dysregulated immunoregulation.”
“Your love makes me feel alive,” she says, eyes on the floor, blank faced, looking anything but alive.
This once bubbly girl with a jazzy soul and a voice bursting in major chords, weeping over the beauty in Chopin’s Preludes, as lights soared beneath her slender fingers moving across ivory keys. Who attended college until her senior year only to suddenly withdraw with a forest fire burning through her mind.
When Alma first felt a lump in her right breast, she assumed it was a meaningless skin lesion. But it grew, ultimately taking over the breast. Then her skin blistered, thickened, and turned red. Alma knew it was breast cancer—she’d looked up online images of advanced disease but abruptly closed the web pages. She told herself that “cancer doesn’t happen to me.” Though in her 40s, she was her father’s “mini-me,” adored and indulged.
I entered the world as a rag doll—so poorly sewn together that one pull on a single thread could cause me to unravel. And throughout my more than seven decades of life, many threads have been pulled. Whether I’m receiving exceptionally good news or dealing with inconveniences that I magnify into tragedies, I all too easily become undone and succumb to a tsunami of tears.
Dear Pulse readers,
In my work as a physician, I sometimes see patients whose bodies have come undone. It happens. But in truth, I spend far more time reassuring patients that their bodies have not come undone.
That lump is not a cancer.
Your headache is not a brain tumor.
The phone rings. “Can I see a doctor?”
“We’re fully booked three months out, I’m sorry.”
“There’s nothing?”
Anger builds.
Being a caregiver is one of the noblest and most challenging roles a person can take on. It requires compassion, patience, dedication and sacrifice. As a medical doctor, I have observed how caregivers make a huge difference in the lives of my patients, and I always try to take time to listen to their struggle.
Dear Veterinary Technician,
It’s been thirty years, but I remember how softly you entered the exam room, holding Marmaduke’s leash. I remember your porcelain skin and beautiful long hair framing your young face. I dabbed my tears with a Kleenex. I didn’t want Marmaduke to think I was upset with her. She’d endured surgery and four months of chemo, but now it wasn’t working. I’d viewed the X-ray of her lungs dotted with metastatic tumors. Hope had turned to cold fear and despair.
On my first day at nursing college, everything was a blur. When I came home, my sister asked if I knew the name of the security guard at the college gate. I looked at her like she had two heads! Why on earth would I need that information?
“Trust me!” she said. “It will come handy!”
I rolled my eyes and sighed. But I knew my sister, and she always had a method to her madness.
Times were uncertain. It was World War II, and Dad was overseas, serving in the U.S Navy. Mom and I lived with my Polish grandparents, but she kept their apartment so we would have a place of our own when Dad returned. She worked long hours in a local laundry to make that dream come true.
© 2024 Pulse - Voices from the Heart of Medicine, Inc. All rights reserved.
