Stories Archives - Page 25 of 58

Greetings and Salutations

12 Comments / Stories / Frederick Guggenheim

I have seen tribesmen in the West African country of Mali meet each other on a narrow dirt path and stop to spend several minutes chanting highly scripted greetings. When they part, shortly afterwards, there is an equally elaborate farewell.

As a psychiatrist and medical educator, I’ve seen my colleagues carrying out a parallel ritual: Two doctors hurriedly passing each other in a hospital hallway and cheerily but tersely saying, “How are you?”–neither slowing down to hear the other’s response. The greeting is equally formalized; it’s just shorter.

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Lovebirds

9 Comments / Stories / As told to Kristen Lee

Editor’s Note: During a summer internship with Pulse, medical student Kristen Lee had the opportunity to interview Mr. C, who comes to a Bronx family health center for medical care. He was accompanied by his wife, who never goes to the doctor for herself but frequently joins her husband to make sure that he’s giving his doctor accurate information. They are both immigrants to the Bronx–he from the Dominican Republic and she from Puerto Rico. Their immigrant story is uniquely theirs and also typically American. See their photo at the story’s end.

Mrs. C: I’ve known him for forty-five years. That’s how long we’ve been married. I was old when we got married, like thirty-three. He was seven years younger than me, but we’re still here. We met when I went to the Dominican Republic. My big sister was married to a Dominican guy; that guy was close to him. And he told him that to get to the US–

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King of Pain

13 Comments / Stories / James G. Mackey

I am a retired union plumber with the state of Illinois. I’ve had laparoscopic surgery on both knees, a lower back surgery that required two stainless rods and I’m not sure how many screws, and three cervical fusions. I now suffer from neuropathy (nerve dysfunction) in my feet. They’re painfully numb: A shoe could come off, and I wouldn’t know it. I find it difficult to get around–not to mention embarrassing when I go back into a restaurant looking for a sandal.

I don’t understand why in today’s world, with medical research moving so fast, I’m in so much pain.

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Desperate Measures

15 Comments / Stories / Anonymous

In my very first job as a doctor, working in a London hospital in the 1980s, I always took a ridiculously detailed past medical history for every patient I saw. I started to notice how many elderly women had had septicemia, a life-threatening infection in which enormous amounts of bacteria enter the bloodstream.

The neighborhood surrounding the hospital had once been the worst slum in London, and it didn’t take me long to guess that these infections were probably caused by illegal self-induced abortions during the hungry years of the Depression.

When I asked–slowly, carefully, subtly–I was told some intensely personal and secret stories.

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Breadwinner

2 Comments / Stories / Elaine Huang

The first thing I notice are the dark circles under Mr. Jones’s eyes.

It’s 4:30 pm on a Wednesday during my third year of medical school. I’m in the fifth week of my family-medicine rotation, and we’re deep into our daily routine: triage, history, physical examination, differential diagnosis, present the case to the attending physician, repeat.

Mr. Jones is a new patient. His face and belly are round, his arms and legs lanky. His unkempt facial hair and calloused hands reflect a life of physical labor that has worn him down. According to his chart, he’s just started an office job. Slumped apathetically in a chair in the corner, he seems apprehensive and hesitant to talk to me. Understandably so: I’m a stranger with the word “student” attached to my name.

“I can’t remember how long it’s been since I’ve seen a primary-care doctor,” he begins.

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Birth of a Midwife

12 Comments / Stories / Rebecca Leeman

As a nurse, I was brand new to labor and delivery–and I was on my third night shift in a row. Walking back from a quick break, I was called over by the charge nurse.

“You have the next admit from triage,” she told me. “She’s a live one–and so is her family. They’re carnies.”

“What’s that?” I asked, bewildered.

“You know, the people who do the circus and carnival circuit–gypsies,” she said, innocently using a term that is now considered derogatory, but was then often applied to the nomadic ethnic group known as Roma. “She’s going natural.”

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A Flower in Winter

4 Comments / Stories / Joseph Fennelly

It’s winter of 1993. A cold, snowy day. Windy. A blizzard. The phone rings.

I’m not on call for my patients today–except for one. Daisy has been in my care since the early 1970s, and given the risk that she may suffer a serious downturn, I’ve instructed her nursing home to call me whenever necessary.

This is that call. Daisy, my dear lady, the old artist, is dying.

Throughout her nine decades of life, her passion for poetry and painting, and her ability to engage the people around her, have been her constant companions on what has been a fraught journey. Her heart, however, has grown weary and is finally giving out.

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Being There

9 Comments / Stories / Matthew Baer

Question: What is the most read book in a psychiatric ward?

Answer: Based on my observations, it’s the Christian Bible. During my psychiatry rotation in the third year of medical school, I saw so many patients researching, reading and preaching the word of God. Clearly, in those pages they found something they needed: vengeance against those who’d wronged them, a secret prophecy, confirmation of their sanity. Or maybe they saw the central message: “You’re loved. We (God, humans, nature, whatever) care for you and will take care of you. We understand you.”

Seeing these patients cling to the Bible felt moving and deeply sad–painful, really. A younger, more innocent me might have seen some grace and faith. But, honestly, all I saw was emptiness–in the sense that patients in deep despair, who’ve been told, “Your mind is broken,” “Your body is broken” or “You’re going to die soon,” lack something in their lives: real human connection.

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The Big Chill

7 Comments / Stories / Aarya Krishnan Rajalakshmi

Tonight was yet another night on call in our emergency department–a chilly winter night on which I did a cruel deed: I discharged a homeless man back out into the cold.

This is a routine event in the life of psychiatry residents like myself. Normally, no one would bat an eye. It shouldn’t have mattered to me, either–except that the previous night I’d had to walk home from the hospital parking garage in decidedly adverse weather.

The streets were covered with slush and ice, which, along with the heavy rain and bitter winds, made my usually effortless fifteen-minute walk a nightmare. As wind gusts kept upturning my umbrella, I struggled to manage it while also trying to keep my feet from slipping on the ice.

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Casseroles and Conversations

9 Comments / Stories / Warren Holleman

2017 was a heartbreaking year for our family.

To start things off, my wife’s parents–both of them!–were diagnosed with terminal illnesses. We spent the next few months immersed in the painful, complex process of transitioning them to home hospice care and beginning to face and grieve the prospect of their deaths.

In the midst of this, Hurricane Harvey began heading towards Houston, our hometown. My wife, Marsha, drove to her parents’ ranch, south of the city, intending to bring them back to our home, on higher ground. But the heavy rains arrived a day earlier than expected, trapping Marsha and her parents for three terrifying days and nights in their flooded house.

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My Black Bag

14 Comments / Stories / Andrew Levitas

Retirement means downsizing. “If a thing doesn’t give you joy, throw it away,” says the current mantra, as if it were that simple.

In my study closet, behind my obsolete Kodachrome lecture slides (about as necessary these days as a harpsichord), sits my little black bag. Does it give me joy? It’s much more complicated than that.

The bag holds all the medical instruments I carried through my training as a doctor–internship, residency and fellowship: sphygmomanometer (no longer functional), stethoscope, ophthalmoscope, otoscope, reflex hammer. There’s also a moldy leatherette case containing the dissecting kit that I used in classes from college biology through gross anatomy. The instruments are still shiny and sharp, which is more than I can say for myself.

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Finding the Words

10 Comments / Stories / Theresa Weinman

“So how was your trip?” ask well-meaning friends and coworkers when I return from a medical mission to Engeye Health Clinic, in rural Uganda. Even years after my first trip there, trying to find the perfect words to describe it is a challenge.

I have been involved with Engeye since its founding, more than a decade ago. As the administrative coordinator with Albany Medical College’s department of family and community medicine, I helped a second-year medical student, Stephanie Van Dyke, and a faculty member, Dr. Bob Paeglow, put together a medical-mission trip to the small Ugandan village of Ddegeya. The clinic was to be managed by a visionary accountant named John Kalule (born in Ddegeya) and staffed by visiting US physicians. My role was to recruit the medical teams and handle all of the trip’s logistics.

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