Stories Archives - Page 31 of 58

Riding Out the Storm

Dan Yashinsky ~

In Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, if a blizzard keeps you in your neighbor’s house, they say you’ve been “storm-stayed.” I first learned this term from a storyteller in the Maritimes, and it’s come to hold special meaning for me and those I work with.

I am the storyteller-in-residence at a research and teaching hospital for the elderly, in Toronto. My work here, known as “storycare,” reflects the institution’s philosophy that literature and storytelling are essential to health care.

Every week, I work with clinicians and therapists to bring storycare to patients in the palliative-care, rehab and long-term-care units. Twice weekly, I head to the fourth floor to co-lead storytelling circles for the geriatric psychiatry patients.

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A Stranger Comes to Town

21 Comments / Stories / Syed M. Ahmed

Syed M. Ahmed ~

Twenty-five years ago, having completed my family-medicine residency, I left Houston to start a two-year stint practicing in a remote village of fewer than 2,000 souls in the Appalachian Mountains of Ohio.

The day I arrived at my new workplace (a two-person practice in the only clinic for fifty miles), my new colleague Dr. Jones told me that she was leaving the next day on a two-week vacation.

Hearing this, I felt anxious, to say the least. I’d expected her to take time off, but so soon? Also, not only were this Appalachian town and its folks completely unknown to me, and vice-versa, but I was the first Asian physician to come to those parts.

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Fear No Evil

11 Comments / Stories / Scott Janssen

Scott Janssen ~

“You need to get here now!” The nurse whispers anxiously. It’s after midnight. One of our hospice patients has just died at home, and her husband is threatening to shoot himself when the funeral home shows up.

“Has the funeral home been called?” I ask.

“No.”

“Does he have a gun or weapon?”

“We’re out in the country. There are deer heads on the wall.”

I try not to stereotype, but deer heads are a giveaway. There are probably lots of guns.

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Christmas Story

8 Comments / Stories / Ned Towle

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

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

6 Comments / Stories / Joe Andrie

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

4 Comments / Stories / Nadine Semer

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

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

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

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

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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