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

SubscribeEnergizeOR
Facebook Instagram Tiktok Bluesky

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

SubscribeEnergizeOR
Facebook Instagram Tiktok Bluesky

Stories

Chemo? No, Thanks

Leave a Comment / Stories /

Elaine Whitman

“If I were you,” said the radiologist, as I sat on the gurney discreetly wiping goo from my right breast, “I’d make an appointment with a breast surgeon as soon as possible.” His somber tone of voice, the white blotch radiating ugly spider tendrils on his ultrasound screen…neither of these made me nervous. If anything, I felt mild interest: “How very odd. He must think I have breast cancer. Or something.”

Ten days later, after a lumpectomy and sentinel lymph node biopsy, my husband and I sat in the breast surgeon’s office. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “You have Stage IIb breast cancer. There’s a 1.1 cm tumor in your right breast, and the cancer has spread to three of your lymph nodes.” 

I looked first at his solemn face, then around the room. Who was he talking to? I believe the psychological term is “dissociation”: a defense mechanism against painful emotions. Oddly, I didn’t feel particularly frightened–just very, very tired. Neal drove me home and I took a five-hour nap. 

When I woke up, I realized it was true. I had breast cancer. 

Three days later, barely recovered from the lumpectomy, I had a second surgery to » Continue Reading.

Chemo? No, Thanks Read More »

First Night Call

Leave a Comment / Stories /

Abby Caplin

During my first night on call as an intern, I felt scared. Not just scared–terrified. I was serving on the medical center’s pediatric oncology floor, and medical school hadn’t prepared me for children with cancer. What did I know about cutting-edge chemotherapy regimens? What if a child suddenly developed an overwhelming infection or a seizure triggered by a tumor? Someone would expect me to know what to do.

“It’s okay,” said Brad, the second-year resident. “The nurses do everything. You just treat the kids’ hypertension.”

“How?” I asked.

“Hydralazine,” he answered, glancing at his watch. He looked tired and ready to split. “Ten to twenty milligrams IV every four hours.” When I looked up from my hasty scribbling, he was gone. I was alone.

For reassurance, I touched the small but reliable pediatric handbook in my white coat pocket. My other pocket was stuffed with index cards, each labeled with a patient’s name, diagnosis and quantities of information written in my tiny print.

I looked down the hall towards the spill of light at the nursing station, the darkening corridors lined with rooms of sick children all trying to sleep–or at least not vomit from the chemotherapy.

I

First Night Call Read More »

Snowscape

Leave a Comment / Stories /

Jeffrey R. Steinbauer

The snowstorm had started on Friday, before I’d gone on call for my group. At first I’d thought the weekend would remain quiet, that the small town where I practiced might just slumber under a fresh blanket of snow. But by early Saturday morning, things had gotten busy at the hospital. Several emergency-room visits, phone calls and admissions from the nursing home changed the stillness I’d felt amid the snowfall. In no time, there was the familiar stress of trying to bring order to a day that was rapidly becoming chaotic. 

Sometime that afternoon, I looked up from a chart to see the town sheriff standing at the nursing station. Although we were acquainted through weekly Rotary Club meetings, he now was barely recognizable–bundled in heavy winter clothing, his head covered by a parka hood. Flakes of snow lingered on his jacket and caked his boots. Beneath the hooded parka, his eyes were severe and his face ruddy; together they broadcast an unspoken weather report. He was not smiling.

“Doc, we need you to come with us,” he said.

This was an unusual request, coming at an inconvenient time. There was much to be done–phone calls to

Snowscape Read More »

Ripped From the Headlights

Leave a Comment / Stories /

Maureen Picard Robins

“Get a notebook,” he said. 

Dr. Altman and I stood face to face on the pediatric surgical floor of Columbia-Presbyterian Babies & Children’s Hospital. It was the first week in December. A metal crib–it seemed more like a cage or prison–separated us. In this center space lay my yellow heart: my eight-week-old daughter, wounded by surgery, dulled by morphine, our whispers flying over her.

It had been nearly twenty-four hours since Dr. Altman opened the baby’s abdomen and held her tiny intestines in his hands, untwisting them like a fisherman untangling his line; nearly one day since he’d performed a Kasai procedure, fashioning a conduit so that bile could tremble down to her small intestine; one thousand four hundred and forty minutes since I’d been ripped from the headlights of the speeding car known as biliary atresia, a rare condition in which the duct from the liver to the small intestine is blocked or missing. 

“There’s a lot to learn,” Dr. Altman said. “Write down all your questions. There is no way you will remember all this.”

There was only one question I wanted to ask, and I didn’t dare.

Besides that, there were so many other

Ripped From the Headlights Read More »

A View From Nepal

Leave a Comment / Stories /

Caroline Jones

The farmer wanted to know why his three-year-old son couldn’t walk or talk. 

I sat opposite him in a dark, cold classroom converted into an examination room for a four-day medical clinic last spring in the village of Lapa, high in the Himalayas. 

Wind whistled through the stone walls; rain pounded on the tin roof. The room’s single ceiling bulb kept flickering and dying; I had to use a camping headlamp to see my notes. And communications were hampered, to say the least: We conversed via two translators–from English to Nepali, from Nepali to the local Tamang language, then back again. It sounded a bit like the telephone game, and had similarly uncertain results.

Still, one look was all I needed to make the diagnosis: Down syndrome. I found the telltale single hand crease, eye folds and wide gap between the first and second toes and asked about the boy’s medical history: he’d never seen a doctor; sometimes he had diarrhea, fever or a cough. 

I thought back to my journey here, the last leg of which had begun five days earlier. With two other doctors, I had left Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, on a winding, bumpy, eight-hour Jeep

A View From Nepal Read More »

Thanksgiving Reflections

1 Comment / Stories /

Pulse Writers and Editors

Editor’s Note: This Thanksgiving tugs hard at the emotions. While an economic gale roils the world, our freshly chosen captain stands on deck, pointing out a new direction for our battered ship of state. At the same time, each of us has personal joys and sorrows to contemplate. We asked Pulse’s writers and editors to take a moment to share their reflections.

This year, I am thankful for my four quirky little grandsons, my three loving children and my beloved husband of almost forty years. I am especially thankful that the country we share has a chance to find its way again and to call all of us, young and old, toward a future that can still be bright and full of promise. –Johanna Shapiro

I’m thankful for my daughter, and for how she kicks and growls in delight when I enter her room at 6 a.m. –Joanne Wilkinson

As one who came of political age in the 1960s, I remember as only a young man can the losses of JFK, RFK and MLK. As an older man, I’m all too aware of the fragility of any single human life. But I will be grateful this Thanksgiving for

Thanksgiving Reflections Read More »

Hospice

Leave a Comment / Stories /

Joanne Wilkinson

My patient’s beagle is very quiet. He lies next to the brown leather living-room chair she used to sit in when I would come to see her at home. His nose is down on his paws, and his round eyes look up at me, up at the nurses, the home health aides, the family members who go back and forth between here and the back bedroom. He is very alert, but silent. He stays perfectly still.

My patient’s sons want to know things. How much longer will it be, will she be in pain, what will the end be like, will she be conscious? Should they take the rest of the week off from work, should they call the son in California and ask him to come? Yes, I tell them. Bring the relatives from far away, call in sick to work, get the minister, the undertaker, the cousin with the good voice who wants to sing at the service. It won’t be long. 

They pace back and forth in the kitchen, stirring the air with their movement. Their footsteps shake the house’s foundations. Would it have been different, they ask, if we’d caught it earlier, if she’d

Hospice Read More »

My Patient, My Friend

1 Comment / Stories /

Death is not always the same. Quantity, fixed: one per patient. Quality, variable.

Doctors see many deaths, of different kinds. This is true of any doctor, whether or not he or she is a surgeon, as I am.

It’s easier for the doctor when death is expected, following a long illness, a chronic disease. Harder when it’s unforeseen–the heart attack, the accident, the gun shot, the sudden death in a young man or woman who seemed a conqueror.

My Patient, My Friend Read More »

Halloween Horrors

Leave a Comment / Stories /

Paul Gross

One October evening last year, I went to our local pharmacy to pick up a prescription for my daughter. I made sure to bring Cara’s insurance card because my employer had switched us to a new health plan.

I wasn’t sorry about the change. Our prior plan had been operated by incompetents–although they might only have been crooks, I couldn’t be sure–who also managed our flexible spending accounts. These accounts, you may recall, collect pre-tax income from your pay and then return it to you to pay for out-of-pocket medical expenses.

With that plan, nothing ever worked as advertised. I would submit a dental bill for reimbursement and the company would review it for three months before sending me a denial notice, stating that my health plan had no dental coverage.

“I know that I have no dental coverage,” I’d tell the representative on the phone. “That’s why I put a big X in the box labeled Flexible Spending Account.”

“You sure did!” she’d say cheerfully. “I don’t know why they did that. You’ll have to submit it again. This time, put my name on it….”

Or I’d submit a claim for a medical expense that was covered,

Halloween Horrors Read More »

Entry from an Intern’s Journal

Leave a Comment / Stories /

Jennifer Reckrey

Editor’s note: Over the next months we’ll be carrying occasional pieces by Jennifer Reckrey, a family medicine resident in New York City. Each week while she was an intern, Dr. Reckrey recorded some of her experiences as a brand-new resident. Today’s story is from week number six. 

How do you convince someone to do something they don’t really care about?

This week I took care of a 58-year-old woman who came to the hospital with one week of fevers, diarrhea, burning with urination, and abdominal pain. Though she probably had an infection, the CT scan she got in the ER didn’t reveal its source. It did, however, show that something was wrong with her uterus and ovaries. If the odd-looking mass was an abscess, it needed to be drained. If it was a cancer, she needed a very different sort of treatment plan. And to find out what was going on, she needed an MRI.

When I first asked her about it, she quickly agreed. She’d had MRIs scheduled in the past (her outpatient gynecologist was concerned about her too), but had always missed her appointments. She seemed glad for the chance to get this cumbersome test over

Entry from an Intern’s Journal Read More »

Carmen’s Story

Leave a Comment / Stories /

Carmen Diaz

I used to be a shy woman who didn’t like the spotlight and never did any public speaking. Ovarian cancer has changed all that. Now I look for opportunities to tell my story. 

I am a 62-year-old, Puerto Rican-born, New York-raised mother of two. I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2004. But for more than a year before that, my symptoms weren’t recognized. 

In January 2003, I started to suffer from abdominal discomfort, back pain, indigestion and heartburn. My primary-care physician told me to change my diet and prescribed medication for my indigestion. After weeks with no improvement, I went to a gastroenterologist, who diagnosed gallstones. In March, I had gallbladder surgery. 

Most people go back to work within ten days, but it took me a month. My fatigue, heartburn and stomach cramps, I was told, were probably a result of the surgery. Over the following months, I kept returning to my primary-care doctor, who prescribed antacids. Eventually, fearing that he’d brand me a hypochondriac, I stopped going.

That fall, during a routine gynecological check-up, I told my ob-gyn that I was feeling pelvic pressure and a burning sensation in my bladder. My pelvic exam and Pap

Carmen’s Story Read More »

In the Nick of Time

Leave a Comment / Stories /

Barry Thompson

When the ringing woke me at 3:00 a.m., I hoped that it was my alarm clock. For a neurologist on call, middle-of-the-night phone calls mean trouble; as a rule, you don’t get awakened at that hour unless it’s something really serious.

At 6:00 p.m. the prior evening, a young man had shown up in the ER of one of our satellite hospitals with a severe headache. He’d been diagnosed with a tension headache and discharged with a prescription for acetaminophen with codeine. No imaging studies had been done.

Nine hours later, the patient presented to the ER at our main hospital. He was no longer fully alert, the ER doc told me. I told him to get an immediate CT scan of the head. I was out of bed and through the door in an instant, worrying about this young, otherwise healthy man with a severe headache and reduced alertness. It’s amazing how fast you can drive in the dead of night when you’re nervous that a life may hang in the balance.

I parked in my usual spot, right by the ER entrance, and ran inside. The nurse told me that the patient had been sent upstairs

In the Nick of Time Read More »

© 2024 Pulse - Voices from the Heart of Medicine, Inc. All rights reserved.

Website Design & Development by New York Design Studio, LLC

Start typing and press enter to search

Scroll to Top

Subscribe to Pulse.

It's free.

Facebook Instagram Tiktok Bluesky
GIVE THE GIFT OF PULSEGiveTHE GIFT OF Pulse