fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

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fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

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Stories

Little Lady

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Samyukta Mullangi

Growing up, I was the one thought to be the most squeamish about medicine–the needles, the knives, the musty smell of alcohol swabs and the rusty stench of blood. Whenever my mother, an ob/gyn, talked on the phone with her patients about menstruation, cramps and bloating, I’d plug my ears and wish for death by embarrassment. Once, standing in line for a routine TB test, I had a friend pull up a chair for me “in case you faint.” 

So my entire family thought it hilarious when I decided to go to medical school. 

“You know that residents practice stitches on each other, don’t you?” my cousin teased. 

“Consider real estate instead,” my grandmother advised.

In deference to her, I actually did go and obtain a real estate license. But I also persevered in the pursuit of medicine. So much about the profession appealed to me: the intellectual challenges; the lifelong learning; the intimacy found only in a doctor’s office. Born into a family of physicians, I’d had a glimpse into their working lives that most people don’t get, and I deeply valued what I saw.

My first hurdle in medical school, of course, was anatomy lab.

Four » Continue Reading.

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Just This Once

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Majid Khan

It’s a rainy Thursday evening in our small inner-city practice. Today is the receptionist’s birthday, and I’ve been cordially invited to attend a small party prepared by her coworkers.

As I descend the green carpeted steps to the lounge, my aching muscles remind me about the torture session (otherwise known as “boxercise”) that I attended last night in my ongoing effort to get fit and control my weight. I still feel slightly resentful of Robert, the trainer; when he caught me slacking off during sit-ups, he embarrassed me in front of the class by making me repeat them.

Good job I didn’t tell him about those two slices of cake I ate last week….

I turn at the bottom of the stairs and enter the lounge. The tables are full; there’s something for every taste bud. For no apparent reason, while exchanging pleasantries with the staff members, I remember Daniel.

When Daniel visited our practice, he looked like so many others I’d seen. He wore a scruffy brown coat and tracksuit pants. There was also the faint aroma, neither pleasant nor unpleasant,

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Genuine Touch

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Jonathan Gotfried

I was a medical student doing my fourth-year rotation on the oncology floor. The floor offered many new sights, and from the first, I was struck by the two mammoth massage chairs sitting in a corner at the end of the longest corridor. 

Their exaggerated curves were plastered with jet-black faux leather adorned with stitching details. Long, smooth armrests of oak jutted out on either side. The remote control was a virtual supercomputer offering thousands of programs designed to enhance one’s massaging pleasure–kneading, fast, pressure, heat, full-body massage. On either side of the plush headrest, strategically placed speakers would play soft classical music, drowning out the low hum of the motor that powered the massage. Proudly, the label on the back declared these to be “Genuine Touch” massage chairs. 

“These chairs were purchased to make the patients’ experience as comfortable and pain-free as possible,” explained my supervising physician on my first day there. 

Other attempts to help ease stress and pain were everywhere. An acupuncturist sometimes joined the teams of doctors, nurses, therapists, psychologists and pastors. There was a daily prayer group, and teams

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Medicine Land Celebrates a Birthday

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Paul Gross

The first real patient of my medical career was a 60-year-old man in the surgical intensive care unit. I met him on the first day of the third year of medical school, when students join teams of doctors doing inpatient medicine.

The surgical team met at 7:00 am–a ludicrously early hour, I thought. There were nearly ten of us–four students, a couple of interns and senior residents and a chief resident.

As the team gathered around the patient’s bed, we students hung back, looking at the form before us. A pale, fleshy foot poked out from under his hospital gown. The room smelled funny.

The patient was comatose. Had he been awake and alert, he might not have been heartened by our team’s assessment, which was swift and automatic. In a telegraphic blur a resident recounted this poor man’s dismal hospital course, which included postoperative complications, and rattled off lab results. An intern picked up a clipboard from the edge of the bed and recited vital signs. A senior resident palpated the man’s abdomen.

The chief resident looked in our direction. “Listen to the lungs!” he barked. Startled, we jumped and began fumbling with our stethoscopes.

With his

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One Hundred Wiser

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Anne K. Merritt

I gather my belongings: stained white coat, stethoscope, pen light, black ballpoint. I stuff the last two granola bars into my canvas bag. I glance at the clock on the microwave, which is three minutes fast. 

Twenty-two minutes until my shift begins. One minute before I will lock the door to my apartment. 

Precision is critical: ER shifts change fast and blend together, from late nights to early mornings to mid-afternoons. Suns set and rise, moons disappear then burst again into full spheres of light. But the rhythm remains fixed. 

I gulp the last ounces of water and grab my keys just as the clock digits change. 

Last week, I reached and surpassed my hundredth shift as a resident physician in the emergency department.

Early on in my emergency medicine residency, I looked forward to my drive to the hospital–twenty minutes of freedom and anticipation. I used to flip from one radio station to the next, scanning for the perfect song to begin my shift. “I Gotta Feeling,” by Black Eyed Peas, perhaps. Or Billy Joel’s “This is the Time.” I was ready to live in the thrill and immediacy of emergency medicine. What excitement will today bring? I’d

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An Apology

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Jordan Grumet

I’m sorry, Mrs. Lewis, for not making it to the hospital to see you yesterday….

Yesterday was one of those days when I felt like I could never catch up. My wife was going downtown for work, and we had to get up early. While she prepared, I helped my two-year-old son get dressed. We walked my wife to the train, then waited for the nanny. She was running late: I finally made it out of the house by 7:20, ten minutes before a meeting at the office. Since I didn’t have any patients in the hospital–or so I thought–I could go directly.

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Recovery Room

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Warren Holleman

We’re sitting in a circle: seven women and me. Most are in their thirties and forties, and in their second, third or fourth month of sobriety. They look professional in the suits they’ve assembled from the donations closet of our inner-city recovery center.

I start things off by reminding everyone that this is the last day of the group. The last hour, in fact.

All eyes turn to Dorothy.

Dorothy is a proud woman, tall and tough and strong. And a former track and field star, although now she’s wheelchair-bound.

She speaks in a deep, husky, monotone punctuated occasionally by dramatic earthquakes–otherwise known as spastic tremors. But in all this time, she’s avoided talking about herself, fueling the suspicion that she’s hiding something really interesting.

I feel tense. Dorothy was assigned to me for individual therapy, but she hasn’t opened up with me, either. I tried showing her how to construct a family genogram, thinking that something tactile might resonate. She played along, but I could see she wasn’t buying it.

“Five years ago,” she tells us, “I got shot in the spine. Yeah.”

The other women fire questions: “How did you get shot?” “How do you take

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A Skeptic Stands Corrected

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Kyna Rubin

I’m prostrate in a Fujian hospital bed. It’s 1980 China, where I’m on a job interpreting for National Geographic–my first gig after graduate school. Fourteen-hour workdays have worn me down, and I’ve contracted bronchitis.

The clinic doctors are required to treat me with both Western and Chinese medicine, which explains the daily shots of tetracycline in my now bruised thigh and the grainy little brown pills I gamely down with boiled water.

“What’s in them?” I ask.

I think I hear something about deer’s antlers and bear sperm, and I don’t want to know much more. But I recover.

Was it the modern or the traditional treatment that got me better? I never give it a thought.

Fast forward twenty-seven years. I’m living near Washington, DC, and for some time have suffered from life-draining back pain. Physical therapists, orthopedists, physiatrists, osteopaths and chiropractors provide temporary or no relief. I’m told that the problem is a torqued spine–but no one can tell me what’s caused it or how to fix it.

After five years of unfruitful physical, osteopathic and chiropractic therapy sessions costing me

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Losing My Vision

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Sheila Solomon Klass

Sunday, September 26 of this past year began normally enough. I did what I do every day, first thing: I put on my glasses and tested my vision. I’m eighty-three years old, and although I’ve always been nearsighted and have lived with glaucoma for thirty years, I’ve developed a worse complaint: AMD, age-related macular degeneration, in my left eye. 

My ophthalmologist diagnosed the AMD after I told him that, when I was reading, the print seemed faded and straight lines looked bent. I learned that AMD eats away at the macula, the central part of the retina, gradually destroying your ability to read, to watch television, even to recognize familiar faces. Today my left eye sees shapes and colors but no details; it cannot read print. 

At that visit, I also learned that AMD comes in two varieties: wet and dry. Dry AMD destroys the tiny blood vessels beneath the macula, blurring the vision; wet AMD forms new abnormal blood vessels, which leak fluid and damage the vision more severely. 

I had the dry kind, considered better because it doesn’t spread from one eye to the other. But, warned my ophthalmologist, it could treacherously turn wet at

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The House Always Wins

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Rashmi Kaura

Death. A five-letter word. The inevitable conclusion to our accomplishments, dreams, emotions and essence. Feared and ignored by the well, acknowledged and perhaps even welcomed by the ailing.

As physicians we are constantly gambling against this inevitability, playing the odds with our arsenal of diagnostics and therapeutics. Even when the odds against us grow longer, we forge ahead, bidding to prolong life through technology and wonder drugs.

Many times, staring into the tired, tortured eyes of a frail and debilitated patient while preparing to subject him or her to painful tests and treatments with a stroke of my pen, I wonder, Why do I insist on playing this game when the house is likely to win? Isn’t the whole point of gambling knowing when to quit, knowing how to cut your losses?

These questions came to mind when, as a medical resident, I took over the care of Jane Barnstable, a 61-year-old woman with terminal leukemia, admitted to the hospital because of general weakness and low blood pressure, and transferred to the ICU on account of worsening metabolic abnormalities.

When I first met Jane, I was struck by her vibrant, put-together look–her short, well-groomed hair, her smiling countenance touched

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Shujinwa Byoki Des

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Lucy Moore

I don’t speak Japanese, but I can say “Shujinwa byoki des” (my husband is sick). 

After spending a month in Bali studying art, sweating profusely and slapping mosquitoes, we were heading home to New Mexico, with a stop in Hiroshima on the way. Our first morning there, my husband, Roberto, woke with a fever of 103 and a full body rash. 

The hotel had a thermometer, but no doctor. As Roberto’s fever neared 104, we hailed a cab for Hiroshima City Hospital. (That was when I pieced together shujinwa byoki des from my pocket dictionary.)

In the large, orderly waiting room, we were the only Caucasians. Roberto was a sight–lobster-red and wild-eyed. Staff and patients politely averted their eyes. 

A nurse led us to the lab for blood work, and after filling several tubes, she withdrew the needle and pressed a gauze pad onto the site. She bent Roberto’s arm to stop the bleeding, but when he opened it up, the gauze pad, red and soggy, fell onto the floor, and a little fountain of blood squirted from his arm. 

I laughed. To me it was comical, but one look at the nurse’s face told me otherwise. Her eyes widened,

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Past Medical History

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Donald Stewart

My career in medicine began when I was three years old.
Holding tightly to my father’s hand at the end of a dark hospital corridor, I couldn’t keep up with the heavy, sibilant stream of conversation flowing between Daddy and Dr. Mashburn, the man who had delivered me, who had sewn up my chin after I’d slipped in the bathtub a month before and who was now explaining the details of Mommy’s condition. Something, I knew, was making her bad. Sometimes her arms and her back hurt so much she couldn’t even pick me up.
My attention slipped away from the confusing drone of grown-up words and fixed on a bright black-and-white picture shining down from a lighted box on the wall. The “x-array” film clearly showed a gleaming white shaft of bone (my mother’s clavicle, a word unknown to me at the time) with a perfectly round, dark spot in the middle. One day I would understand this spot to be a hole in my mother’s skeleton. Such x-ray findings were evidence of eosinophilic granuloma, a disease that causes white blood cells to multiply and clump together at various points in the body. This illness was the

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