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

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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

Christmas Story

8 Comments / Stories /

Ned Towle ~

Christmas Day 2012

This Christmas is different. My wife and I are spending the day alone, as our two children and four grandchildren came over yesterday for the big celebration.

It’s 10:00 in the morning. I have just completed a nine-mile run and am sitting on the living-room floor. My wife, Linda, is on the sofa with her computer.

I feel unusually tired; rather than take a shower, I want to climb into bed.

After all, I did just run nine miles, I tell myself.

My lungs are sore, but running for an hour and twenty-five minutes in thirty-six-degree weather seems a good reason for that. My right arm is numb and my right hand cold, but I reflect that, on my run, I wore a new Christmas gift jacket. That must have pinched the blood flow….

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Playing a Hunch

7 Comments / Stories /

Amy Crawford-Faucher ~

There’s one thing about being a family doctor: After a while, almost every patient you see is a familiar face. This can be a blessing or a curse, but mostly it’s a blessing.

This morning I’m in my office, reviewing today’s patients with Julia, the medical student rotating in our office.

I’m especially looking forward to my 10:30 appointment. It’s the first checkup for a newborn girl named Ella. I’ve known her parents, Emily and Dave, since before they had their first daughter, Katie, now three. I think of them as one of “my” families.

Emily and Dave, in their late twenties, have been together since college. Emily works full-time in a management position. Everything about her is calm and unflappable. Her dark blue eyes, neat dark-brown hair and pleasant expression radiate quiet competence. She easily weathers the garden-variety worries and crises of career and child-rearing.

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Birthday Boy

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Joe Andrie ~

It’s another day for me as an intern on the labor-and-delivery floor of my large urban hospital–another day scrambling to help pregnant women deliver and trying to keep pace with the unpredictable timetable of the birthing process.

My hospital phone rings. I’m really starting to dread that sound.

It’s the triage nurse. We’re admitting a patient: Mrs. Harris, age thirty-four, who’s had several prior deliveries and therefore carries the label “multiparous,” or just “multip.”

Flipping through her records, I see “G5P4” noted. “G” means the number of pregnancies; “P” indicates how many children she has.

A mother of four who’s at term and having contractions…I’ve seen such women give birth within a matter of minutes. In plain language, Mrs. Harris’s chart means “HURRY!”

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She Likes Chocolate

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Nadine Semer ~

“She doesn’t like vanilla,” Mr. Wyatt says, staring at the nutritional drinks sitting on his wife’s bedside hospital table.


I’m here as the palliative-medicine consultant. As my resident Susan and I stand still, taken aback, Susan’s expression says it all: She’s dying, and her husband is worried about which flavors she likes?

Mrs. Wyatt, fifty-six, came to our urban hospital’s emergency room with abdominal pain. She was admitted and given intravenous fluids and broad-spectrum antibiotics. Her workup revealed widespread, untreatable cancer. Her medical team has consulted us because they’re frustrated at her family’s unwillingness to acknowledge that she’s failing.

“Explained her poor prognosis; she needs to be DNR,” read the consult request. “But still, the family wants everything done.”

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Fighting the Odds

18 Comments / Stories /

Evelyn Lai ~

Monday

I walk into your room in the pediatric intensive-care unit as two nurses are repositioning you. Your parents stand nearby–your dad in his frayed baseball cap and khaki cargo shorts; your mom, her baggy jeans wrinkled with the same worry as the lines near her eyes. Your little sister sits near the window with a blue hospital mask over her mouth, hugging her knees; Grandma sits snug beside her, back straight and hair done, expression cordial.

You are a fifteen-year-old boy with leukemia who came into our emergency department last week with fevers, but spiraled quickly into septic shock with multiorgan failure.

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Cri de Coeur

16 Comments / Stories /

Naderge Pierre ~

As a surgical resident nearing my final year of training, I loved to operate. Whenever I was on call in the trauma unit at our large urban teaching hospital in Washington, DC, I’d yearn for my pager to go off.

I was always tired, too–but for a surgical resident, fatigue is a given. Sleep and eat when you can, get your work done and operate like a madwoman: That was my life. It felt like a high-adrenaline thrill ride, and I was enjoying every swoop and turn.

I never expected that, while racing towards the final exhilarating peak of my training, I would become a patient myself.

Ironically, it happened right after the most memorable surgery of my trauma rotation.

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Lean on Me

12 Comments / Stories /

Joseph Fennelly ~

One morning in my office, a tall, slim package arrives along with a note, a portion of which follows:


Dr. Fennelly,

I can’t apologize enough for not getting your walking stick back sooner. Since my dad’s passing we have had to move my mother (who has a memory problem) several times, and with each move the walking stick moved too.



In some ways it reminded me of my dad and the relationship you and he had. It was comforting for him and us to know he had you in his corner to lean on and support him.



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Why Aren’t You Depressed?

2 Comments / Stories /

Tess Timmes ~

“Please walk slowly,” cautioned Sunita, my interpreter, as I crept down the stony switchback trail towards the rural Nepali village of Dhulikhel. Sunita, in her petite navy ballet flats, hopped down the rocks as easily as the speckled goats grazing nearby.

Emboldened by her speed, I stepped along eagerly, only to catch my size-ten neon running sneaker on a root and splat face-first into the dust. Looking up, I saw four women standing outside their clay-walled homes, their hands pressed to their mouths, their eyes sparkling with stifled laughter. Talk about making an entrance….

After finishing my third year of medical school, I was taking a year off to pursue my masters degree in public health. Through my research that year, I’d learned of an opportunity to spend a month in Dhulikhel, located in the Kathmandu Valley, south of the Himalayas, interviewing the region’s women about their use of primary-care and mental-health services. Passionate about women’s health, and eager to escape another Boston winter, I signed on.

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Too Close for Comfort

6 Comments / Stories /

Andrea Eisenberg ~

Many years ago, on a busy day in my obstetrics-and-gynecology office, one of my partner’s patients came in for “bleeding, early pregnancy.” Since my partner wasn’t in that day, I saw the woman, whose name was Sarah. After we’d talked a bit, I examined her and did an ultrasound. As I’d expected, she was having a miscarriage. Feeling sorry that Sarah had to hear it from me, rather than from her own doctor, I broke the sad news.

We discussed the options: Did she want to have a D&C, or let nature take its course?

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I need some time to decide.” I agreed that this was understandable and left the room so that she could dress. Having notified my partner, I thought no more about it.

A month later, I received a letter from Sarah accusing me of callousness and insensitivity in our encounter.

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Cat and Mouse

7 Comments / Stories /

Kristen Lee ~

On TV shows, therapists decorate their rooms with leather lounge chairs, throw pillows and organza curtains that let in the light.

But Dr. Hassan’s office is in the clinic basement. The fluorescent lighting is sterile. She has a gray metal desk–I think every doctor I’ve shadowed as a medical student has had that same desk.

But I’m not here as a student.

I’ve been anticipating this appointment for a month. In March, I started to take an online physiology exam for school, but instead spent twenty minutes staring motionless at the computer screen. I eventually input the answers and passed the test, but I’d stopped caring.

A week later, I had a panic attack while riding the 6 Train through Midtown Manhattan at rush hour. I’d already been feeling trapped by the tightly scheduled lifestyle of a medical student, and getting sandwiched between strangers inside an underground tube of concrete didn’t help.

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Mom at Home

3 Comments / Stories /

Arlen Gargagliano ~

Aisha is lurking in the kitchen just outside my home-office door. I hear her rattling dishes and speaking to herself in Twi, a language of her native Ghana. I know that she wants my attention, but I’ve told her that I need time to work. I try to focus on grading my college students’ papers, but I’m distracted.

Aisha is one of my mother’s aides. My mother requires care twenty-four/seven, and Aisha is one of several women, primarily foreign-born, who care for her in shifts. Mom’s had this arrangement since 2012, when several ministrokes disabled her brain and self-care abilities, and a broken leg left her mostly bedbound. My father’s recent death, ending their marriage of more than five decades, prompted my husband and me to bring Mom into our home. She’s been living here with us for the past five months.

In Mom’s younger days, the word “dynamo” wouldn’t begin to describe her. She orchestrated countless gatherings and large-scale fiestas at home for our family (my parents, my four siblings and me), our large extended family and friends and Dad’s Mad Men clients. She bossed us all around with prep tasks, and delighted guests

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Coming Up Short

5 Comments / Stories /

Meghan G. Liroff ~

“Why so short?” says the four-year-old girl who’s here with an upper-respiratory infection.

Standing safely between her dad’s knees, she wears a bright pink jumpsuit. Her cheeks are dimpled; her hair is piled in a frizzy bun. She looks me up and down, as if trying to make sense of me.

I can’t help laughing.

It’s true, I think. At five feet even, I’m not blessed with height–but I make up for it in chutzpah. I squat down to bring my eyes level with hers.

“I’m not laughing at you,” I reassure her. “I’m just laughing because you picked up on a major thread in my life.”

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