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On the Bottom Rung

Leave a Comment / Stories / Jordanna Platt

I was in my third year of medical school, and the initial week of my first-ever hospital clerkship had passed without incident. I showed up on time, did what I was told, stepped on no toes and followed my patients as well as I could.

At the close of that week, however, my intern pulled me aside to ask, “Remember learning how to put an IV in a mannequin during the workshop earlier today? Well, there’s a patient in radiology, waiting for a CT scan. The tech can’t flush the IV, and I need you to do it. If you can’t, put in a new one.”

Tech? Flush? I meditated on my intern’s words and realized that this would be my first unsupervised procedure.

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A Passage in India

Leave a Comment / Stories / Justin Sanders

Justin Sanders

“It’s cooler this morning,” I said to Seema, as we left the hospital grounds en route to our home visits.

It was a bright and bustling morning in Trivandrum, the capital of India’s southwesternmost state, Kerala. A third-year resident in family medicine, I had come here to work with the staff of an Indian nonprofit devoted to advancing palliative care services across India. Seema was a young, newly qualified junior doctor who had only recently joined the organization. We were traveling with five others–our driver, two nurses and two nursing trainees–into the mountains east of Trivandrum for the day.

“We don’t really speak about the weather like you do,” Seema gently chided. “In the West you spend lots of time talking about the weather.” As I silently ceded her point, she consoled me: “I think you have more variety to your weather. Here it is only hot, very hot, or cold and rainy. Most people carry an umbrella because it’s useful in any of those cases.”

I counted the passing umbrellas as our van carried us into the foothills on our way to Palode, a village where we would hold a small outpatient clinic before making home visits.

After the

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Hospital Librarian

Leave a Comment / Stories / Pam Kress-Dunn

Pam Kress-Dunn

Some people seem surprised to find a library in a hospital. But it’s here, and so am I. Having been a librarian in lots of different libraries–public, academic, archival–I jumped at this job when it opened up. Little did I know what I was getting into.

Like many medical librarians, I work solo. I do have a volunteer who, despite being decades older than me, works tirelessly during the two days a week she’s here. But I’m the one who does the lit searches, tracks down the articles in medical journals and finds the piece of information the doctor requires before the surgery that’s scheduled for noon.

My predecessor told me about his most harrowing moment: A surgeon needed information–stat!–and it was available only from a journal our library didn’t carry. So he placed an interlibrary loan request, marking it “Urgent: Patient Care.” When the article came through on the fax machine, he read it aloud over the phone to the surgeon, who was standing in the OR as a nurse pressed the receiver to his ear.

I’ve had my own anxious

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Little Lady

Leave a Comment / Stories / Samyukta Mullangi

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

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Genuine Touch

Leave a Comment / Stories / Jonathan Gotfried

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

One Hundred Wiser

Leave a Comment / Stories / Anne K. Merritt

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

Leave a Comment / Stories / Jordan Grumet

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

Leave a Comment / Stories / Warren Holleman

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

Losing My Vision

Leave a Comment / Stories / Sheila Solomon Klass

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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