Stories Archives - Page 39 of 58

Last Writes

Hilton Koppe

Jeez mate, you are really dead. “Really fucking dead,” as you would say. I don’t need to be a doctor to know that. The cop who rang me was right. You must have been sitting in your lounge chair, dead, for at least twelve hours, maybe more. Looks like you were enjoying a quiet drink when you checked out.

I’ve got to tell you mate, it’s pretty weird sitting here at your dining table, with you there, slumped over all mottled and cold, while I’m trying to fill out your death certificate. With your advance-care directive staring at me from on top of all your papers on the table. Was it left there as a gift for me? I did feel a little better when I read that you wanted to be allowed to die a natural death. That you didn’t want any more medical interventions (God knows, you’d had enough of those already). That you wanted to die in your home.

Was it the chemo that knocked you off in the end? That’s what I want to believe. Because if it wasn’t that, then it might have been the high potassium level in your » Continue Reading.

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How Will I Know You’re Not Dead?

11 Comments / Stories / Raymond Abbott

Raymond Abbott

I never thought it would go on for so long–seeing Donald Wyatt, I mean. I certainly didn’t plan it this way.

More than six years ago, I retired at age sixty-six from my social-work job at a mental-health agency. Donald had been my client there for about eight years.

As I was cleaning out my office, his mother called. She explained how Donald’s father had left when Donald was not much more than an infant, which had made him sensitive to abandonment, especially by male figures. Could I, she wondered, meet Donald once in awhile for coffee or lunch?

“Yes,” I said, “I can do that.”

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Surprise Ending

9 Comments / Stories / Ellen Kolton

Ellen Kolton

“He’s just expired,” said the nurse as I approached Ray’s room in the large inner-city hospital where I work as a patient advocate. “And his wife has just arrived. Why don’t you go in?”

I found Natalie bent over Ray’s body. His hollow cheek was drenched with her tears.

“I’m so sor–“

“I told him yesterday to talk to Jesus,” Natalie interrupted, speaking quickly. “I told him if the two of them decided it was time for him to go, then it was okay with me. I guess they had their talk,” she said, glancing at Ray as though expecting an answer.

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My Father’s Girl

23 Comments / Stories / Maureen Hirthler

I’m walking very slowly with my dad down the produce aisle at the local supermarket, past the colorful waxed apples, Mexican mangoes and Rainier cherries, and imagining my life’s blood trickling onto the floor from an invisible wound.

As I pass by the misting system spraying the bins of green, red, yellow and orange peppers, past the lady reaching for carrots, past the stock guy balancing the heirloom tomatoes into a precarious stack, I want to scream. The sense of loss is overpowering.

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Chocolate Cake

20 Comments / Stories / Sanyu Janardan

Sanyu Janardan

I was a first-year medical student, starting my first afternoon at an outpatient clinic as part of an introductory course in clinical medicine. My white coat was freshly washed; I had a rainbow of pens in one coat pocket, and my shiny name tag dangled from the other. I only hoped that I was as prepared as I looked.

I entered Mrs. Carr’s room. A fifty-five-year-old woman, she sat gingerly at the edge of her chair, looking ready to get up at any moment, as if the appointment were already over. She gave me a cursory glance, then went back to folding and refolding the bus-ticket stub in her hands.

I asked a well-rehearsed question: “What brings you to our clinic?”

“Chocolate cake,” she answered.

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Go Ask Alice

10 Comments / Stories / Ellen Rand

Ellen Rand

In 2010, I became a hospice volunteer.

My mother had died of a brain tumor five years earlier at age eighty-seven. I saw being a hospice volunteer as a way to express my gratitude for my mother’s compassionate hospice care and to help other caregivers to weather a loved one’s passing. And, as a former reporter and writer, I thought I could help people to write their life stories, if they were interested.

In short, I wanted to act on E.M. Forster’s words, which for me sum up the goal of hospice: “Only connect.”

I soon realized, though, that by the time most people come to hospice, they’re too ill and/or too demented to carry on a conventional conversation, much less to express complex thoughts about the arc and meaning of their lives.

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Thirty Below

18 Comments / Stories / Kristie Johnson

Kristie Johnson

One cold February morning during my third year of medical school, I walked through the entrance of the rural hospital where I was doing a nine-month rotation, and made my way to the nurses’ station. Feeling the warmth return to my face, I set down my coat and bag and hung my stethoscope around my neck.

The charge nurse, Barb, waved me to her computer.

“Kristie, you have a patient.”

She shuffled through papers, grabbed a blank chart and placed the patient’s admission note on top. When she saw the name, her face fell.

“Ah, it’s Peggy.”

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Sick of Getting Sick

8 Comments / Stories / Mimi Emig

I awoke one Saturday morning to a terribly familiar feeling–a tight, barky cough, fast breathing, severe shortness of breath and burning in my chest. Another severe asthma attack. I knew I was in trouble.

Twenty-three years ago, when I was an internal-medicine resident, I went to be evaluated for recurrent pneumonia. I wound up being diagnosed with cough-variant asthma. Most asthmatic patients wheeze; when my asthma is bad, I cough.

I now realize that I’ve probably had asthma all my life. When I was a child, though, cough-variant asthma wasn’t recognized as a disease, at least not in the small upstate New York town where I was raised. So, instead, I was the “sickly child”–the one who got a cold with a cough that lingered for a month, who missed thirty days of school each year, who was teased for being smaller than the other kids and who, in high-school, coughed furiously after every cross-country running practice.

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Assaulted by “Health Care”

23 Comments / Stories / Sandra Shea

Sandra Shea

I’m no stranger to dealing with the medical world and its billing systems. I’m a triple cancer survivor, had knee surgery in 2012 and now have ulcerative colitis. All told, I’ve had eleven surgeries and fourteen colonoscopies. Paperwork is practically my middle name.

But the last twenty-four hours have been ridiculous.

In that time, I’ve had three different encounters with healthcare billing–each absurd in its own way, and each more challenging than the last. Things got to where I almost had to laugh. And if almost $10,000 of my money hadn’t been at stake, I would have.

Yesterday morning and early afternoon were punctuated by the following events:

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Popping the Question

34 Comments / Stories / Mitch Kaminski

Mitch Kaminski

Mr. Dwyer isn’t my patient, but today I’m covering for my partner in our family-practice office, so he’s been slipped into my schedule.

Reading his chart, I have an ominous feeling that this visit won’t be simple.

A tall, lanky man with an air of quiet dignity, Mr. Dwyer is eighty-eight. His legs are swollen, and merely talking makes him short of breath.

He suffers from both congestive heart failure and renal failure. It’s a medical catch-22: when one condition is treated and gets better, the other condition gets worse. His past year has been an endless cycle of medication adjustments carried out by dueling specialists and punctuated by emergency-room visits and hospitalizations.

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I’m Happy

10 Comments / Stories / Raymond Abbott

Raymond Abbott

On my voice mail is a message from Donald Wyatt. He doesn’t often call, but every Monday morning he comes to see me at the Louisville, Kentucky, mental-health clinic where I’m a social worker.

His message is brief: “I’m not feeling well, and I am planning a trip to either St. Louis or Elizabethtown.”

I smile, wondering at the odd pairing. Elizabethtown is a small city of 50,000 people. And, well, St. Louis is St. Louis, a metropolis.

This behavior is not unusual for Donald. He’s disappeared before, always out of state and by bus. He doesn’t have the money to travel any other way, although once he took his parents’ van and drove to Ohio. (He has no driver’s license.) Never before, however, has he called beforehand.

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Casting Out Demons

14 Comments / Stories / Jef Gamblée

Jef Gamblee

As I stand beside the bed in Mr. Jerome’s living room, his pit bull puppy sniffs the body bag lying on a stretcher nearby. His cat curls up on the bedside shelf.

“That dog gonna be a problem?” asks Jude, one of the crematory guys.

“She might get underfoot,” says the neighbor, whose name I can’t remember. “But she’s a lover, not a fighter.”

Jude and Chuck are here to pick up Mr. Jerome, who died of prostate cancer today. His body lies on the bed–the wasted husk of a once lively, athletic man who had taught history in a New Jersey middle school.

I’m a hospice chaplain; Mr. Jerome was my client. I’d known him for about six months.

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