Stories Archives - Page 29 of 58

Me Too

It’s late on a Friday afternoon in the outpatient clinic where I’m a third-year psychiatry resident. I’m wrapping up my appointment with Jane, a thirty-five-year-old woman with a mild intellectual disability who comes every month to refill her antidepressant prescription.

“Have you been watching the court case on TV?” she whispers.

I stop what I’m doing and look at her.

“The case with the judge and the doctor,” she says.

I sit back in my chair and give her my full attention.

“I’ve been reading about it,” I say. “Why do you ask?”

She looks down at her hands. “It’s just so hard to watch.”

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On Being a Lady and a Doctor

18 Comments / Stories / Caitlin Bass

Caitlin Bass ~

It’s 8:00 pm, and it’s hour fourteen in my twenty-eight-hour call shift at the large suburban hospital where I’m an intern.

You demand to speak with a doctor now, right now. You cannot wait. Your mother is sick, and you want to know exactly what is going on.

It doesn’t matter that we already spoke at length by phone earlier this afternoon. It doesn’t matter that it’s 8:00 pm. It doesn’t matter that I don’t have any updates to give you.

You’re here, and you want to speak with a doctor, your mother’s doctor, now, right now.

Luckily for you, that’s me.

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Who Am I Now?

9 Comments / Stories / Jeremy PIvor

Jeremy Pivor ~

On my first day of medical school, my father, a dentist, told me he’d just been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. Cancer had crept back into my life–except this time not into my body.

At age twelve, I was diagnosed with brain cancer. After an aggressive surgery, I was tumor-free for ten years. Then, at twenty-three, I received the news of an inoperable recurrence.

While going through radiation and chemotherapy, I struggled with how to move forward in the face of endless uncertainty–until I realized that, with or without cancer, everyone lives with uncertainty. Since I never knew what the next day would bring, I decided that the most important thing wasn’t where I wanted to be in ten, fifteen or twenty years but how I wanted to live now, in the present. So I applied to medical school.

Given how long it takes to become a doctor, this decision may seem absurd. For me, however, living in the present meant fostering human connection, and I felt I could do that best as a physician.

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Wounded Healer

11 Comments / Stories / Jamie Sweigart

Jamie Sweigart ~

It was a sunny Sunday afternoon on my urban college campus. I’d been sitting on the grass outside a lecture hall where my premed classmates and I would study together on weekends. This particular weekend, I was alone. Campus was empty, except for a man with a backpack who occasionally passed by.

Finished with studying, I started walking down a deserted sidewalk back to my apartment, a few blocks away. On the way, I dialed my best friend from home, Laura, and we began chatting.

“Hang up the phone,” said a man’s voice behind me. I felt the cold blade of a knife against the side of my neck.

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Right Coat Ceremony

11 Comments / Stories / Shadi Ahmadmehrabi

Shadi Ahmadmehrabi ~

It was my first day of orientation at medical school. In a hallway stood a coat rack overflowing with white garments. I set down my accumulated papers, reached for a hanger and, for the first time ever, shrugged first one arm and then the other into a white coat.

It was too large, but I had no other options. The unisex coats ran from XXS to XXL, but the smallest had all been claimed.

As I clumsily buttoned my coat on the right (women’s coats button on the left), I couldn’t help seeing this as a physical reminder that, as my mentors had warned, medicine continues to be male-dominated, and that I’d need to pick my battles.

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Deadlock

7 Comments / Stories / Zachary Reese

Zachary Reese ~

“Does a rock float on water?” I asked the haggard woman lying in the ICU bed.

I was an intern, in the first rotation of my medical residency, and Mrs. Jones had been my ICU team’s patient for the past week. Over that time, she’d looked more and more uncomfortable, constantly gesturing for her breathing tube to be removed.

Mrs. Jones tried to form words in response to my question, but the plastic tube in her mouth prevented it. Her chest rose and fell in rhythm with the ventilator’s hiss as the machine pumped air into her lungs; her muscles were too weak to do the work themselves.

After several attempts at speaking, she gave up and shook her head. No.

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Metamorphosis

6 Comments / Stories / Lisa Burr

Lisa Burr ~

It was another simmering-hot Texas day, and the AC was faltering in the family-practice clinic where I worked as a family nurse practitioner. Most of our clients were poor and spoke only Spanish.

My nurse, Eliza, approached, wide-eyed.

“There’s a new patient–a woman named Maraby. She seems really angry,” she murmured. “She’s the color of Dijon mustard, and she’s wearing a long, heavy wool cape. She looks like she’s nine months pregnant with triplets. There’s a man with her, but he’s not saying anything.”

Gingerly, I entered the exam room. Maraby, a tall woman, sat staring at the floor. Her partner, Darren, stood to one side. When I glanced his way, he anxiously averted his eyes.

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My Immigrant Patients

12 Comments / Stories / Joanna Sharpless

Joanna Sharpless ~

In the living room of the house where I grew up hangs a framed copy of a seventeenth-century map of Pennsylvania. The land is divided into tiny plots, each painstakingly labeled with a family name.

When I was little, I’d stand in front of the map and search for the little squares labeled “Sharples”–the original version of my last name. I’d imagine my distant ancestors, John and Jane Sharples and their seven children, dressed in bonnets and breeches as they sailed across the Atlantic in 1682. As Quakers, they’d purchased land from William Penn and had fled religious persecution in their home country, England.

To a young girl, their immigration story sounded romantic; but as I grew older, I realized that it wasn’t. Their life in England must have been unbearable for them to be willing to risk losing everything in order to rebuild their lives in a strange wilderness. Indeed, they paid a steep price: One of their children died on the journey. I also had to consider their role as colonizers, living on land that had once belonged to Native Americans. How should I feel about my family’s immigration story?

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The Second Law of Medicine

16 Comments / Stories / Sandra Relyea

Sandra Relyea ~

I sit in the cab of an old pickup truck on my father’s farm, listening to the water gurgling through irrigation tubes alongside a field. The truck is parked next to a barbed-wire fence. I’m waiting for the water to reach the far side of the field so I can pull the tubes and reset them in the next field.

As I wait, I watch the setting sun turn the Sangre De Cristo Mountains red and orange. Crickets chirp in the tall grass; frogs start their evening chorus. Smells of alfalfa and milkweed blossoms scent the air. Peace settles over me as the light fades.

To my left, I notice a little spider spinning an orb web between the fence wires. A mosquito buzzes around my face, looking for a good landing spot. I catch it between two fingers and try to place it in the spider’s web.

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Cracked Up

12 Comments / Stories / Carlos Downell

Carlos Downell ~

They say that to write well, you should write about what you know. I’m a homeless drug addict. This essay is not about me, although I’ll figure in it. It’s about drug abuse among the homeless, a subject I’m very well acquainted with.

I have a dual diagnosis–substance-abuse issues and psychiatric dysfunction. Double trouble. If I can’t get meth, I’ll smoke crack, and if I can’t get crack, I’ll smoke pot or take pills or whatever I can get–anything but inhalants. I’m what’s known as a polysubstance abuser. (Most addicts are.)

I’m in recovery. Sounds like I should be in a hospital bed, and perhaps I should–but I continue to function. I abide, I persevere and I survive: It’s what I do. I reside on the sidewalk, on the railroad tracks, under the freeway overpass.

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Just What the Doctor Ordered

11 Comments / Stories / David Edelbaum

David Edelbaum ~

I began practicing as an internist/nephrologist in the early 1960s. Having rented an office in Los Angeles, I introduced myself to the local medical community and set out to build a practice.

With a growing family, a mortgage and an office to support, I was hungry for patients. Hospital emergency rooms were good referral sources, so I took ER call at three different hospitals.

Late one Friday night, I got a call from one of these hospitals: A middle-aged engineer was in the ER complaining of chest pain. His electrocardiogram showed minor abnormalities, and he needed to be admitted for observation to rule out a heart attack. Back then, this meant several days of blood tests and repeated electrocardiograms. Uncomplicated heart attacks were treated with bed rest, sedation and blood thinners, followed by gradual ambulation and discharge.

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A Good Cry

20 Comments / Stories / Colette Charles

I was a second-year resident, doing a twenty-four-hour shift on maternity care. I’d spent some arduous nights on call with my attending physician, Dr. Campbell; now we sat at the nursing station, joking about what this one might bring.

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