Timeline One
Day 1: For over thirty-five years my strong, spirited spouse, Carlo, served around the world in the Air Force. Now retired from the military, he still serves at the air base as a civilian security police officer.
His neck hurts. A lot. He blames the pain on the unbalanced weight of the bulletproof vest that Uncle Sam added last year to the uniform he proudly wears every day.
Anne Whetzel
Pamela sits on the examining-room stool, looking at me expectantly.
I am in my first year of medical school. I do as I’ve been told to do in Medical Skills class: I observe my patient–without judgment or assumptions–and try to figure out what questions to ask, based on the information I am given.
Pamela has curly, strawberry-blonde hair and looks to be thirty, just a few years older than me. Her infant son lies in a carrier beside her.
Dr. Clark, whom I’m shadowing, has just given Pamela osteopathic manipulative therapy for her chronic headaches. Now the doctor is treating Pamela’s older son, age seven, for back pain; he fell off the school jungle gym a few days ago.
All three patients–mother, son and infant–are wearing red: a red tank-top on the mom, a red t-shirt for the son and a red blanket for the baby.
Evan Heald
A Different View
Most days, Mrs. Finch’s perspective was outrageously optimistic and embarrassingly complimentary. Although she had the typical assortment of nonagenarian maladies, she would not let that define her; whenever she visited my office, it was hard to get to a chief complaint because of her relentless focus on how nicely the parking lot had been graveled, or “what a sweet, sweet nurse you have,” or my partner’s haircut or the “clever, clever little hooks” holding the geraniums at the entry.
Never mind the treasure trove of doubled superlatives she saved for me, her physician.
Mrs. Finch and Ms. Virginia Read More »
Anna Schmidt
Reprieve
Once the weeks of morning sickness subside, I feel as if I’ve grown wings.
Even with the fatigue, it’s as though someone has pressed a great “reset” button on years of inflammation. That elbow joint that hasn’t straightened fully for years suddenly rediscovers its full range of motion. My knees, too, become straighter and stronger than they’ve been in many years.
Even without the meds, ditched in honor of my growing baby’s health, it is my best and most dramatic remission since my teen years–the last time my hormones went to town.
Dance in Three Movements Read More »
Edward Beal
During most of my career as a psychiatrist, I haven’t often dealt directly with death. For the past five years, though, I have had the privilege of spending two days a week treating service men and women returning from deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq. Listening to their stories and talking with them about their war experiences, I’ve spent much more time thinking about death and dying.
Despite this, I was shocked when my wife recently told me she was planning to donate her body to science–specifically, to the Georgetown University Medical Center’s anatomical donors program.
My first thought was that she obviously has never been a first-year medical student in a Gross Anatomy lab. My next impulse was to warn her of her mistake.
S.E. Street
I had been in London on business all of seven hours when my son, Tom, called me at two in the morning from our hometown, Sydney, Australia.
“Grandma’s had a fall. She’s been taken to the hospital, but she’s all right.”
My mother’s having a fall was nothing unusual; she had always been an unpredictable fainter. My husband and children and I called it her party trick, making light of it to soothe her embarrassment.
She had no recollection of these episodes; one minute she’d be seated at the table, and the next, she’d be lying on her back on the floor, her feet propped up on a chair, with the family smiling down at her as if she were Sleeping Beauty awakening from years of slumber.
We are a medical and nursing family–I’m a retired nurse, and my husband, brother and sister-in-law are doctors–and we’d long since had her undergo exhaustive tests to check for serious underlying conditions. The tests had revealed nothing other than a slow heart rate and an occasional drop in blood pressure.
Busting Grandma Out Read More »
Jessica Zitter
It was my first day at my new job, practicing a new specialty. Having spent fourteen years as an ICU physician–including a four-year pulmonary/critical-care fellowship in this very hospital–I had just completed a palliative-care fellowship. Now I was the hospital’s palliative-care consult attending.
When I set eyes on the patient in room 1407, my first thought was: THIS LADY NEEDS TO BE INTUBATED–STAT!
The only trouble was that my job was to ease this patient’s passing, not to prolong her life.
The team had told me that Mrs. Zelnick, an eighty-two-year-old widow, was dying from pneumonia and didn’t want to be put on life support.
A Doctor’s Dilemma Read More »
Sarah Houssayni
Many healers, teachers and parents have them.
At one point, I did, too. I had delusions. I thought I was a hero, a rescuer clad in a shiny white coat and wielding the sword of clinical wisdom.
I look back on those days with nostalgia and regret. I wish they’d lasted a little longer–my belief in my own medical grandeur and invincibility.
My most memorable patient changed that for me.
I remember how her mother, Gigi, first brought Serenity to see me when she was a newborn. Gigi was fifteen; I was annoyed. Too much work for a pediatrician to make sure all the education gets through–after all, she was still a pediatric patient herself.
Adam B. Weiner
Useless….
The word came unbidden into my head.
Oh, no. Here I was, only a few questions into Mr. Marlow’s medical history, and the feeling had begun already.
I’d often experienced this when I was a pre-med student, spending so much time on labs and textbooks instead of with patients. When I’d begun my first year as a medical student, I’d hoped to leave all that behind. Medical school felt energizing: I was ready to see real patients and start helping them!
Rewriting the Script Read More »
Randy Rockney
When I was in medical residency, more than thirty years ago, I ran with a pack of fellow residents, all guys who were fit to varying degrees. Once, on an outing, we discussed the–hopefully–hypothetical question: “If the need arose, which one of us would we eat first?”
“Randy!” my friends gleefully concluded.
“His meat would be the most marbled,” one added.
The Well-Fed Physician Read More »
Amy Eileen Hiscock
I cannot take my eyes from his face.
It has been destroyed in the wreck, along with the rest of his body. His head is misshapen, bloodied. Someone has tried to staple together one of the larger lacerations–extending diagonally across his face and under his chin–but there was little point. They gave up partway through.
I have never seen a dead body. I am twenty-five and in the second of five terms of nursing school.
Thuy D. Bui
“What’s my number?” shouted Betsy as I entered the examination room one day last fall.
“Oh, you mean your A1C? It’s nine-point-four!” I answered. A sentence sped through my mind: “The hemoglobin A1C number tells how well a patient’s diabetes is controlled–seven or less is good.” In my seven years as Betsy’s primary-care doctor, I’ve repeated this information at visits and included it in appointment reminders as well.
Betsy is a pale, stocky woman in her sixties, with short, neatly cropped hair. Her rather tentative smile, to me, always seemed a bit forced, as if covering up for underlying pain. And she’s had plenty of pain in her life.
Beating the Numbers Racket Read More »
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