Sharing personal experiences of giving and receiving health care A premier narrative medicine and medical humanities resource
Sharing personal experiences of
giving and receiving health care A premier narrative medicine
& medical humanities resource
During the month of September - Pulse is accepting Poetry submissions.
The Medicine We Don’t Prescribe
I step into the back of a van on a chilly fall day. I’m a family physician; with me are my medical assistant, Lori, and the front-office representative, Maria, from our federally qualified health center in Reno.
This van is our center’s mobile clinic—one exam room, a point-of-care lab and a front desk squeezed into a space no bigger than a typical bathroom.
Today we’re visiting a family shelter, as we do every week.
Student, Interrupted: A Story in Three Parts
Part I: Student, Interrupted
During my psychiatry rotation as a third-year medical student, I observed patients pacing the halls in socks, their shoelaces sealed in plastic bags (to prevent possible self-harm) along with the rest of their belongings. No phones. No laptops. Just the steady rhythm of footsteps looping around the nurses’ station.
A few months later, I found myself walking that same loop—not as a student but as a patient. My shoelaces were stored away, and I was the one being rounded on.
Pushing and Pulling
Medical training consists of years of daily pushing and pulling. As a medical student, or during residency, you are constantly pulling in senior residents for consultations to provide desperately needed guidance ensuring that you don’t hurt anyone; or else you’re pushing away those same senior residents when you finally feel, It’s okay, I got this.
If you ask for help too early, you’ll meet with stern and frustrated rebukes: “I’m busy! Why are you calling me? You should be able to manage this by now!”
But if you call too late, it’s: “Why didn’t you call me? What the hell were you thinking? You coulda killed him!”
More Voices
Every month readers tell their stories — in 40 to 400 words — on a different healthcare theme.
April 2023
March 2023
February 2023
New Voices
Stories by those whose faces and perspectives are underrepresented in media and in the health professions.
The Distance Between
I was in secondary school in Nigeria when I first noticed the lesion on Uncle Eze’s lip. Like many men of his age in Lagos,
“Teach to Fish for Tomorrow”
It’s a typical Friday night in New Orleans. The streets are brimming with people from all over the world looking for a night of fun
A Different Kind of Different
Editor’s Note: This piece was a finalist in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”
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Poems
Home Visit
You passed the limits
of my knowledge with your
most recent diagnosis, pills and prods
now the specialist’s domain. I hold
Biopsy
Either nothing
or leukemia or nothing or
multiple myeloma or nothing
a tumor, the long needle, the shattered
bone, the blood
Still Cold
On his birthday, my father tries
to eat osso buco with its tiny marrow-spoon.
He scrapes at the shank, a felled tree trunk
