Stories Archives - Page 53 of 56

Tug-of-War

Jo Marie Reilly

As I teach first- and second-year medical students to take patient histories and to perform physical examinations, I always feel humbled and privileged–energized by their compassion, enthusiasm and facile, curious minds.

Occasionally, I feel particularly challenged–especially when I’m teaching a student who, though bright, is struggling to acquire some of medicine’s basic skills. As we journey up the learning curve together, my responsibilities can conflict: as a teacher, I want to nurture an aspiring student physician, yet as a physician, I must ensure that patients receive appropriate care.

Now, sitting quietly in the corner of the room and watching a young medical student interview a county hospital psychiatric patient, I begin to feel this tension.

“What brought you into the hospital?” the student queries nervously.

Small and reserved, she’s quite a contrast to her patient–a burly, imposing middle-aged man, his body splattered with tattoos of birds of prey and firearms. He folds his arms tightly across his chest, and a large cross sparkles on his neck chain.

“It’s when I tried to commit suicide on the bridge,” he responds agitatedly.

There is a long, awkward pause. “So…what medication did you » Continue Reading.

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Invisible Thread

Leave a Comment / Stories / Donald O. Kollisch

Donald O. Kollisch

From: Michael

To: Donald O. Kollisch
Subject: Serious medical update

Don,

I can’t say for sure why I’m writing to you, but you were such an important part of my life during the onset of my illness that I feel a strong desire to communicate with you.

The mysterious autoimmune disorder that was lurking in my body has finally had the decency to declare itself. Unfortunately, it is systemic sclerosis, also called systemic scleroderma, which means I’m facing a gradual but ultimately fatal process of skin, joint and organ degeneration.

It has hit my lungs, seriously affecting my breathing capacity, and has hit my digestive system also. Recently I was in the hospital for ten days because of serious digestive problems and an inability to eat. I’m now on intravenous nutrition, with a line in my arm. I can eat a small amount of food for pleasure, but there’s a real question as to whether I can ever take in enough nutrition by mouth to get off the intravenous line.

My rheumatologist at DHMC is wonderful–a good, honest and very compassionate young doctor. She has been completely

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Millie

Leave a Comment / Stories / Edgar Figueroa

Edgar Figueroa

Looking at Millie in her living-room-turned-hospital-quarters, I can’t help reflecting on the four years we’ve shared as patient and doctor.

We’ve come a long way since our first visit. I was an inexperienced resident; she was a wiry woman who looked to be in her late sixties but was actually fifty-three.

She’d sat back and stared at me, sizing me up.

“You know I have kids that are older than you?” were her first words.

I wasn’t sure if she was complimenting me on my youthful looks or expressing uneasiness at having me as her doctor. I smiled, blushed, quickly refilled her prescription and asked her to follow up.

Over time, I grew quite fond of Millie; seeing her name on the schedule always sparked feelings of pleasant anticipation. She, for her part, somehow grew to trust me, and the health-center staff learned not to argue when she insisted on seeing only “my doctor.” At each visit she would share more of her story: how hard she’d struggled for much of her life, raising three children as a single mother with little support and less money; how much she liked her cigarettes and the occasional drink.

Now Millie

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The Save

Leave a Comment / Stories / Dan J. Schmidt

Dan J. Schmidt

I started medical school thinking I wanted to be a family doctor–someone who could work in a small town and deal with whatever walked through the door. But in our third year, when we received our first taste of clinical medicine, I found my surgery and ER rotations exciting. I was at our state’s major trauma center, and I loved it. Fixing things gives me a thrill–and the power to save a life is even more alluring.

Each “save” felt like a miraculous triumph. Take the nineteen-year-old visiting Australian, stabbed in a random street altercation, his blood pressure dropping as fluid accumulated around his heart. Right there in the ER, he had his chest split open and his right ventricle patched by the very cool chief surgery resident.

But after several weeks of 5 a.m. surgery rounds and every-third-night call, I started to feel a nagging sense of unmet need, both my own and the patients’. To me, it seemed that the specialized care we were giving was excellent but fractured: No one was responsible for the whole person.

It was 8 a.m. during my third week of the rotation. The third-year resident had led us medical

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Giving Care

Leave a Comment / Stories / Ronna L. Edelstein

Ronna L. Edelstein

When I was six, my family and I spent a week in Atlantic City. I loved the Boardwalk with its saltwater-taffy aroma and colorful sights, but I feared the pier that jutted far out into the Atlantic. One moonless night, my big brother bet me a bag of taffy that I couldn’t walk to the pier’s end by myself. Never one to back down, I accepted his bet. But the farther out I walked, the more frightened I got. It felt like one more step would send me off the pier’s edge and into the bottomless black water. My parents rescued me by dashing to the end of the pier and carrying me back to safety.

I spent the next half-century living under two illusions: one, that nothing in my life would ever be as scary as that dark pier; and two, that my parents would always be there to save me. In school, when my Lilliputian classmates mocked my five-foot-eight-inch stature, Ma and Dad talked to me about inner beauty and strength. After the rice strewn along my wedding aisle disintegrated into sharp slivers of divorce, Ma and Dad gave me the financial and emotional support

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Touched

To My Left

Leave a Comment / Stories / Anne Herbert

Anne Herbert

I walk down the airplane aisle, scanning the rows. My eyes finally fall on 15F. My seat.

My nightmare.

This window seat means only one thing to me: someone to my left. A man, to be exact–middle-aged, reading the New York Times and snacking on a bag of peanuts. He doesn’t notice as I shove my purse under the seat and sit down. My only thoughts are of blending in–with the other passengers, with the chair, with the plane itself. Anything.

My objective on this five-hour flight is simple and clear. It’s the same one that I cling to almost every second of every day: to keep my left side hidden from the world.

Everyone has a good side–a more photogenic side, a certain way that they turn when taking pictures. I don’t have a good side, but rather a “less bad” side–a side whose mere completeness is what appeals to me.

My left side charts the history of my birth defect. My severe underbite is an orthodontic byproduct of my cleft lip and palate. The scar under my nose records the surgery that closed my cleft lip. The scar on my hip commemorates a bone-marrow transfer from hip to

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Piece of Work

Leave a Comment / Stories / Jennifer Frank

Jennifer Frank

“You’re a real piece of work!” he spat at me. He was a patient named Martin; I was the supervising physician, trying to role-model for a second-year resident how to conduct a difficult conversation with patients like this.

So far, not so good.

At first glance, Martin seemed an ordinary-looking older man, with close-cut gray hair and plain-framed eyeglasses. But I was struck by his scowl–he was expecting an argument, perhaps because during his interview with the resident he’d already encountered some pushback.

He’d brought a long list of laboratory tests that his biofeedback “doctor” had instructed him to get, saying that his fatigue and other symptoms were caused by “adrenal dysfunction.”

I scanned the list–thyroid, blood count, chemistries, vitamins, adrenal function. “Testing for vitamins,” I thought. “Are they kidding?” Normally, we test for only a small handful of vitamins; would our lab even know how to test for the others?

Outwardly, I tried to look neutral. “If I order a lot of tests, it’s statistically very likely that one will come back abnormal,” I said. “That may not indicate a real problem; it could only mean that you’ll end up having more tests.”

“I want all of

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Counting Cards

Leave a Comment / Stories / Alexandra Godfrey

Alexandra Godfrey

Once again, I see a still heart. As I stare at the fetal monitor, I search for signs of life. The screen flickers; my son’s heart does not.

The last time I saw him, he looked happy–content in his life-bubble. As he turned somersaults, he waved at me. I had thought he was saying hello, but I realize now that he was waving goodbye.

Soon I must deliver his still form into the world. My labor will be difficult–his cries exchanged for my tears; his body, small and membranous, fitting into my one hand.

This is not what I had envisioned. I had dreamt of my son’s vitality, not his mortality. I contemplate the suffering–is there no way to tally up the trauma?

For the third time, I am faced with the loss of a child, and experience is not making it any easier.

When my first child was born, he too had a still heart. As he was rushed away, I was asked to give him a name. I called him Ben.

Life almost evaded him. Ben was born with a complex congenital heart defect that affects one baby in ten thousand. Without emergency cardiac surgery, the

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Each Day, Same Story

Leave a Comment / Stories / Jennifer Reckrey

Jennifer Reckrey

Editor’s Note: Jennifer Reckrey is a family medicine resident in New York City. Each week, while she was an intern, she recorded some of her experiences as a brand-new doctor.

I have been his primary doctor for the entire three weeks he has been on the hospital floor. Sometimes he drives me crazy. Once or twice I’ve asked my senior resident to take over for a bit so I can hide out, catch my breath and try to get some of my other work done. Yet despite his daily demands and my hours of exasperation, I have never felt this connected to a patient before.

Over these weeks, I have watched his health slowly but steadily deteriorate. He first came to the hospital because his home oxygen wasn’t helping as much as usual when he got short of breath while walking. A week later he needed his oxygen whenever he felt anxious. Now he’s short of breath all the time. Without a face mask constantly pumping pure oxygen, his skin turns ashy purple and he slowly becomes agitated, then delirious.

When I got to work this Sunday morning, the night team told me that overnight he had refused

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Breaking Bad News

Coming Full Circle

Leave a Comment / Stories / Stacy Nigliazzo

Stacy Nigliazzo

Only thirty minutes into my evening ER nursing shift, and I was already behind. My first patient was a pregnant teenager with heavy vaginal bleeding. “About three months, I guess,” she flatly replied when asked about her last period. As we placed her legs in the stirrups for the pelvic exam, torrents of blood and water rolled into the kick bucket on the floor.

Dr. Parkman had barely opened the speculum when we saw it. I knew she couldn’t see the doctor’s face, but she could see mine. Shielding her from my expression, stunned and speechless, I cowered as best I could behind her left knee.

There it was. Tiny, pink and perfect. Her baby’s hand, so small that it would easily fit inside the shell of a walnut–outstretched as if reaching for us, for its very life.

The doctor and I both instantly knew there was no chance of survival. It just wasn’t time yet. He removed the speculum, and we watched as the tiny fingers slowly disappeared back inside.

Fifteen minutes later I exited the labor and delivery floor with an empty stretcher, having left my patient in a stark delivery room, pushing. The screeching fetal

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

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

Stories

Tug-of-War

Invisible Thread

Millie

The Save

Giving Care

Touched

To My Left

Piece of Work

Counting Cards

Each Day, Same Story

Breaking Bad News

Coming Full Circle

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

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

Stories

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