Stories Archives

Pushing and Pulling

Medical training consists of years of daily pushing and pulling. As a medical student, or during residency, you are constantly pulling in senior residents for consultations to provide desperately needed guidance ensuring that you don’t hurt anyone; or else you’re pushing away those same senior residents when you finally feel, It’s okay, I got this.

If you ask for help too early, you’ll meet with stern and frustrated rebukes: “I’m busy! Why are you calling me? You should be able to manage this by now!”

But if you call too late, it’s: “Why didn’t you call me? What the hell were you thinking? You coulda killed him!”

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Moment of Truth

9 Comments / Stories / Nancy J. Rennert

Twenty-five-year-old male, Type 1 diabetes with recent left-leg amputation, poor glucose control.

Routine case, I figured. I was the senior endocrinologist at a community health center, teaching resident physicians and caring for medically underserved patients.

I had prepared a chair to my immediate right for the medical resident, Anna, so that by turning my head slightly away from my desktop computer I would be able to see her face clearly. Although she didn’t know it, I was deaf–and with one of my cochlear implants failing, I needed to lip-read to understand speech.

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A Blink Between Love and Loss

11 Comments / Stories / Aleks Radunovic

Beep. Beep. Beep….

I stood in the operating room during Cory’s organ-donation surgery, watching the monitor as his blood pressure dropped and his pulse faded. I was a second-year medical student, just beginning my trauma-surgery rotation in an urban hospital. I remember that day as a series of blinks, each one a snapshot of moments that still linger.

Here’s how it began:

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Empty

7 Comments / Stories / HS

In early February 2020, my husband and I checked into a quaint condo in New Orleans’ French Quarter. We needed a break from our usual lives: My husband worked as a psychiatrist, listening to his patients’ stories of trauma and pain; he was exhausted. I too am a physician; I felt burned out by my administrative job, where I was regularly yelled at and insulted by other physicians.

We hadn’t been coping well. Every evening we sat in front of the television to numb ourselves and quiet the stress enough to go to bed and fall asleep.

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The Screening

3 Comments / Stories / Karen Curran

In 2006, my dad was determined to attend the funeral when his last living brother died. The problem was, Daddy, eighty-two at the time, suffered from cognitive impairment bad enough that for months I’d been trying to get him to move to my home in Tennessee. This trip he was intent on taking would have required a cross-country flight from North Carolina to California—maneuvering through airports, finding a hotel and driving unfamiliar roads in a rental car.

“Daddy, you can’t go out there alone,” I said, wedging the phone between my jaw and shoulder to free my hands for folding laundry.

“Well, why not?”

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Surviving with Sisyphus

12 Comments / Stories / Noora Reffat

The patient in room 214 asks me and my attending if we can sit him up in a chair and bring him a Bible. He has a non-survival injury; wires and tubes tether him immovably to the bed. Even so, we tell him yes and leave the room. A medical student on a mission, I go in search of a chair.

Two doors down, the patient with no hands—they were amputated several days ago—yells out to the hallway:

“Hey! Hey! Is that Black man still out there?”

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“Out, Out, Brief Candle!”

11 Comments / Stories / Judy Fine-Edelstein

I grew up in a multigenerational two-family home in Queens, New York City, during the 1960s and Seventies. Every weekend, my grandparents prepared a feast for the whole family. Among them were my mother’s younger brother, Marvin, and his wife, Inge, an artist who’d immigrated from Germany.

They were childless, but Marvin delighted in his four nieces, including my sister and me. A professor of Shakespearean literature, he read Macbeth and King Lear to us when we were young, along with the more child-friendly works of Lewis Carroll.

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The Call

6 Comments / Stories / Julie R. Rosenbaum

I sink into the plane’s window seat, shade pulled down. My eyelids droop toward sleep. Next to me, headphones in place, my husband catches up on the latest Captain America movie.

I can almost forget that our young son and daughter sit in the row behind us, silent and still, plugged into the iPad for reruns of Good Luck Charlie. They sip the Cokes they never have at home. Together, we fly to Arizona for winter break. After months of working ten- to twelve-hour days as a physician in Connecticut, my body, mind and spirit ache for rest and sunshine.

I hear a distant announcement overhead, and one word grips my attention and snaps my eyes wide open:

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Resilience Has a Voice, If We Listen

6 Comments / Stories / Karen Kikuta

City of God is more than just a film. It is an unflinching depiction of organized crime in Brazil, as seen through the eyes of Rocket, a young boy who dreams of escaping the violence overwhelming his community, the Rio de Janeiro slum known as Cidade de Deus.

Watching the film as a high-school senior, I was struck by its raw, vivid storytelling and by the brutal realities of the country I call home.

Growing up in a stable Brazilian family, with access to education, health care and opportunity, I was fortunate.

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Alice

11 Comments / Stories / Heather Finlay-Morreale

Lying stuck in my hospital bed during the latest of many hospital stays, I reflected on the drastic turns and changes my life had taken.

For ten years I’d enjoyed a busy, fulfilling life as a pediatrician, educator and writer. Then, in the summer of 2020, my life had lurched from 100 miles per hour to a full stop. I’d become progressively weaker and easily grew winded when walking.

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The Quiet Work of Dying

15 Comments / Stories / Christopher M. Smith

The first thing I remember is the sound of oxygen at night.

It was my second week as a hospice nurse. I had just pulled up to a modest home on a cul-de-sac, the kind of place where wind chimes echo off empty sidewalks. Inside, a man in his seventies was dying of end-stage pulmonary fibrosis. He was surrounded by family, but it was that soft hiss—steady and rhythmic, like an artificial tide—that centered the room.

His breathing was labored, yet peaceful. His wife sat beside him, holding one hand.

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Dr. Poetry

12 Comments / Stories / Kate Rosenblum

You may imagine that this story will be about how poetry heals. And poetry does heal, but this story is not about that. Rather, it is a story of healing made possible by the relationship between physician and patient—of the power of words and metaphor, of being with and feeling seen, and of the human potential for posttraumatic growth.

We met on the eighth floor of the university hospital, after I was admitted for neutropenic sepsis (a serious infection coupled with low white-blood-cell count and often linked to cancer treatments) and a pulmonary embolism.

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