Stories Archives - Page 32 of 58

Too Close for Comfort

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

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

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

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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Out of the Blue

8 Comments / Stories / Marianna Crane

Marianna Crane ~

As I sit in the exam room waiting for my first patient of the afternoon, the phone rings. It rings four more times before I realize that Amanda Ringwald, our eighty-year-old receptionist, hasn’t come back from taking a rare lunch break.

I pick up the phone and say, “VA Hospital. Marianna Crane.” Oops, I’m not back at the VA anymore. “Senior Clinic,” I quickly add.

“Hello, my friend.”

The familiar voice makes my throat tighten and my eyes water. How in God’s name did he track me down at work?

“Mr. Foley. How are you?”

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My First Code

3 Comments / Stories / Jessica Greenberg

Jessica Greenberg ~

“Code Blue, Interventional Radiology suite,” blare the overhead speakers.

I am a new third-year medical student, doing my first rotation in internal medicine at Yale New Haven Hospital. This morning, I’ve been rounding on patients with my medical team.

The alarm sends us lumbering down the halls, struggling to keep our clogs from falling off our feet, clutching our white jackets to our chests to keep the pockets full of stethoscopes and pens and patient lists from bouncing.

Arriving in the IR suite, I stop about twenty feet from the middle-aged woman lying in the patient bed. More than a dozen physicians and nurses crowd around her, obscuring my view.

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Simple Acts

14 Comments / Stories / Dianne Avey

Dianne Avey ~

One night on my nursing shift in the cardiac intensive-care unit, I received a new patient from the operating room: an eighty-eight-year-old woman who had suffered a major heart attack and had just undergone emergency coronary-artery bypass surgery.

Her bed was wheeled into the room along with the usual accoutrements: six different IV drips, a ventilator, an aortic balloon pump and various other lines and monitoring devices. Her name, I saw on the chart, was Mrs. Green.

The young surgeon took me aside.

“I don’t care what it takes, just keep her alive for twenty-four hours,” he told me, clearly more worried about his surgical-outcome stats than he was about Mrs. Green’s welfare. The hospital and insurers kept data on these procedures; it didn’t look well for a surgeon to have too many patients die during or right after surgery.

“No problem,” I replied confidently and went right to work, adjusting drips to maintain her blood pressure, cardiac output and heart rhythm.

Despite my efforts, Mrs. Green’s health status remained very unstable. Her heart was extremely weak, and she showed signs of brain damage.

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Learning Respect

5 Comments / Stories / David Edelbaum

David Edelbaum ~

When I finished my medical training, almost sixty years ago, I was like many new graduates: I thought I knew it all.

I opened a private office in Los Angeles and paid courtesy calls on the local physicians to let them know my qualifications and my availability for consultation, as both an internist and a nephrologist. (The treatment of kidney disease was then in its infancy, and I was the area’s first such specialist.)

With a wife, two children under age four, a home mortgage and an office to support, I needed to make a living. I took call at the local emergency rooms, worked nights at the VA Hospital and told my answering service to mention my availability to other physicians who might need assistance.

One of the very first doctors I visited was Dr. Lud, a large, friendly, highly competent and respected family physician. His patients adored him, and if he asked you to consult on one of his cases, that was the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval: It assured your standing within the medical community–and, of course, a steady income.

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Who Would Want to Do This?

24 Comments / Stories / Kristin Beard

Kristin Beard ~

“Get the patient on the monitor.”

“How long has he been down? Someone get on the chest!”

“Keep ventilating. He’s in v-fib. Defibrillate at 200.”

“Charging, everybody clear?…Shock delivered.”

“Resume compressions. Push one of epinephrine…Hold compressions. What rhythm is he in?”

“He’s asystole, resume compressions.”

We repeat the process a hundred times over. The medic said they started coding the patient an hour ago. The family is in the consult room with the chaplain.

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It Takes a Tokyo Village

12 Comments / Stories / Ruth Harimoto

Ruth Harimoto

I have lived in Japan for more than half of my life. I first came here as a nine-year-old child, the daughter of a missionary. Later, after several years of study and work in the US, I returned as an adult with my Japanese husband. You’d think that after more than thirty years here, I could almost call myself Japanese! But no. In this homogeneous country, I’m still a foreigner.

The role of a foreigner in Japan is, for the most part, a comfortable one. Japanese people are polite. They don’t expect foreigners to know Japanese, so when I do speak it (with my learned-as-a-child accent), I’m applauded and praised. This role can also be lonely, though.

As I go about daily life, my five-foot-seven height and Caucasian features automatically set me apart; there’s no possibility of melting into the crowd. Small children stare at my blue eyes and light hair. Sometimes, on a crowded train, the open seat next to me will remain open. Gaijin, the Japanese term for anyone non-Japanese, means “outside person.” I must accept that I am, and always will be, a gaijin.

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Matching Rings

8 Comments / Stories / Joy Liu

Joy Liu

The room is stuffy, but the woman is shivering.

Her husband stands by her bedside. An interpreter that they’ve hired to stay with her day and night stands at the foot of the bed. And then there’s me, the doctor (I’m an intern), waiting to deliver one of many sad speeches I must give today.

Smiling wanly, she struggles into a sitting position and shakes my hand.

Even with a diagnosis of metastatic stomach cancer, she has movie-star looks. She’s only twenty-six–the same age as me. I can imagine her stepping out of a red-carpet premiere in Shanghai. Instead, having hired personal interpreters and taken a flight halfway across the world, here she is in this hospital bed, waiting expectantly for me to tell her what we can offer her.

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Saving Private Ryan

21 Comments / Stories / Gregory Rutecki

Gregory Rutecki

The late Eighties was the worst of times in medical education–the era when doctors in training worked a virtually unlimited number of hours each week. This unceasing and inhumane workload led residents, understandably, to view patients purely as collections of physical ailments.

Back then, I was an attending physician at a community teaching hospital. One day, as usual, I was preparing to make morning rounds and, simultaneously, to do my best to teach my team of internal-medicine residents.

Fourteen patients awaited us, every one of them quite sick. As my team and I proceeded from one bedside to the next, struggling to cram the patient interviews into ever-dwindling snippets of time, I felt a familiar sense of growing pressure; it was a struggle to focus fully on each patient.

Despite this, our last patient’s chart notes grabbed my complete attention.

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