Stories Archives - Page 21 of 56

In the Biodome

As a pulmonary and critical-care medicine fellow, I care for patients with a broad variety of respiratory ailments. But little did I know, as I examined my patient Mr. Smith in the outpatient pulmonary clinic this past winter, that I’d see him again only months later as my first patient with COVID-19.

Mr. Smith was tough as nails. A stoic retired steelworker and former smoker, he suffered from significant emphysema, but was inclined–by nature and by necessity–to fight through his symptoms with limited medical help.

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This Is Why

3 Comments / Stories / H. Lee Kagan

February 2016
Tierra Nueva, Dominican Republic

I’m in the last of five days caring for patients at rural clinics in western DR, along the Haitian frontier.

Tierra Nueva, miles from anywhere, is a collection of clapboard shanties and shacks scattered along a dusty, unpaved road that dead-ends at the border. People survive here by coaxing vegetables out of the earth via scratch farming. The lucky ones have a goat and maybe some hens.

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Burned Out

9 Comments / Stories / David Janeway

It’s been five months since I left my position as a psychiatrist and medical director, and like everyone, I’m wrestling with questions about how COVID-19 has changed our lives, maybe forever. As I read the news and hear from my former colleagues, who’ve had to quickly ramp up to deliver telepsychiatry, I feel a mixture of emotions: fear and concern for my former patients; guilt that I’ve left my colleagues behind to fight on without me; and uncertainty over how I can best help out in this crisis.

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Code Pink

12 Comments / Stories / Perry Dinardo

When a code is called in the hospital, it means two things: A caregiver’s day is about to be turned upside-down, and a patient’s world is about to fall to pieces. If you’re a caregiver, when a code is called you look up from your own work and wonder who’ll be sprinting through the halls and whose story is unfolding.

This time, the story was ours.

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Please Don’t Call Us Heroes

6 Comments / Stories / Judy Fleishman

The people I work with don’t want to be called heroes.

Don’t misunderstand me. I am a psychologist and medical educator in a family-medicine residency that serves a diverse, multilingual immigrant population. I work with healthcare providers of all stripes–family-medicine residents and attending physicians, medical receptionists, medical assistants, case workers and clinic managers. My colleagues are profoundly dedicated, talented, hardworking, flexible, creative and compassionate. They absolutely want to do everything they can to help patients during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Inside the Respiratory Tent

8 Comments / Stories / Joanne Wilkinson

Spring comes slowly to New England. When I leave the house in the mornings at the end of April, I pull my fleece jacket tighter around me on my way to the car. My preteen daughter’s dark eyes and solemn mouth watch from the second-floor window as I pull away.

In the “don and doff” station at the respiratory tent in the hospital parking lot, I put on a gown and gloves, then take one last lungful of chilly damp air (grass, diesel fuel, coffee smells from the bodega across the street) before I plaster the N95 mask to my face, looping the elastic bands over my head like jump ropes.

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Mommy Chuy

3 Comments / Stories / Amy Engler

Mrs. Hernandez is a ninety-two-year-old Spanish-speaking woman, originally from Mexico, with high blood pressure and high cholesterol, who arrived in the emergency department of the hospital where I’m a fourth-year medical student.

Her right arm and leg were weak, the right side of her face drooped; her speech was slurred, and she seemed confused. Her CT scans showed that a blood clot had blocked her middle cerebral artery, in the area of the brain that governs language. Mrs. Hernandez was a stroke victim.

Mrs. Hernandez is also my abuela.

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Doing Time

17 Comments / Stories / Jill Siebers

COVID-19 Confinement, Day Four: My partner, James, sleeps. He coughs. He breathes. He smiled this morning when I brought in tea. He nodded when I asked if he wanted the curtains open so that he could look at the sea, then returned to sleep.

We’re quarantined in James’s new beach house on a skinny peninsula that’s only three blocks wide, bay-to-sea, off of New Jersey. I am a stranger here. When a cardiologist covering for James’s doctor in New York asked me the location of the nearest hospital, I couldn’t say.

I’m sitting in the second bedroom on a small orange settee. Hard and spare, it provides the structure on which I wait as we make our way through the long days–James in one room, I in the next, close enough to respond if need be.

We haven’t even finished furnishing this place. This room has no bedside table or lamp. There is an electrical short inside the wall next to my bed. If I bump it, the ceiling light blows out.

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Living-Room Code

5 Comments / Stories / Utsha Khatri

It was a cold Friday morning, and my day started slow. I was a third-year emergency-medicine resident in West Philadelphia and was doing my EMS rotation.

I rode with the EMS lieutenant, who told me, “My job is to assist the medics with the bad stuff.” This, he explained, usually meant codes (cardiac arrests) and fires.

Then we got the first call and zipped through the city, lights and sirens blaring.

Detachedly, I wondered what type of cardiac arrest awaited us. When we walked into the apartment building and saw a twenty-three-year-old woman in the doorway, her face distraught and fearful, I knew.

The apartment was warm, well furnished and cozy. Firemen, who’d arrived on the scene first, knelt on the blue-carpeted floor to perform CPR on the young man lying there, as the medics tried to put in an IV.

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The Last Pandemic

14 Comments / Stories / Tony Dajer

7:00 on a Sunday evening.

It is day 30+ of New York City’s COVID-19 pandemic. Fire trucks and flashing lights fill the street fronting the hospital emergency department where I’m a physician. The scene erupts into applause and sirens. We doctors, nurses, physician assistants, techs, housekeepers and clerks wave back and flash our individual cardboard letters spelling “Thank You!” It is so good to be outside and, for a few minutes, unafraid. Inside, our ER break room overflows with donated pizzas and pastries. Later we will take cartloads of these up to the jam-packed ICU and medicine floors.

The virus has the world by the throat, and New York City is the epicenter. None of us has ever seen this much death. But all hearts are beating together.

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An Ounce of Empathy

14 Comments / Stories / William Liakos

I am a medical student in my third year of studies. For medical students, this is the point at which, after two years of book learning, we rotate through hospital clerkships that give us our first experience of delivering hands-on care to inpatients.

Earlier in the year (it feels like many lifetimes ago), I read that COVID-19 was “just the flu.” We heard from scientific sources and popular media that other maladies were much worse, and that it would be a mistake to overreact to this one. Like many people, I accepted these assurances without too much concern. It all seemed a bit remote to me–the way I imagine issues like food stamps may seem to a politician who’s never needed them.

But now all of that has changed for me.

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Sweet Child of Mine

6 Comments / Stories / Jenn OConnor

You know what stress is, right? You’re late for work, your car won’t start, gas costs more than you expected. We’ve all been there, and it’s not pleasant, that palm-sweating, heart-racing anxiety. Luckily, it’s not long-lasting–not toxic.

What is toxic stress? It’s prolonged adversity and/or abuse–not having enough to eat, or being exposed to violence. It’s the kind of stress that puts you on edge and keeps you there, day after day after day.

If you’re familiar with one CDC study from the 1990s, you know that factors such as divorce, domestic violence or having an incarcerated parent are called Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). Four or more ACEs can result in chronic health conditions such as heart disease or diabetes. In the long term, living with ACEs or other negative factors, such as poverty, can literally change your brain chemistry.

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

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

Stories

In the Biodome

This Is Why

Burned Out

Code Pink

Please Don’t Call Us Heroes

Inside the Respiratory Tent

Mommy Chuy

Doing Time

Living-Room Code

The Last Pandemic

An Ounce of Empathy

Sweet Child of Mine

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

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Stories

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