May 2022

Caught in the Crossfire

4 Comments / Stories / By Annie Laurie Gula

I’ll call him Rocky. In a drive-by incident, his father was killed, and Rocky, age one, was shot multiple times.

His initial resuscitation was heroic—he received medicines to support his blood pressure, underwent emergency surgeries and was still attached to machines to support his breathing—but by the time I met him, the drama of his shooting had receded: He and his medical team had settled into a stable routine.

Though I suspect that the team had expressed their grief earlier on, I found this sense of calm jarring and unnatural.

June More Voices: Gun Violence

Leave a Comment / Gun Violence / By Paul Gross

Dear Pulse readers,

A few years after my father passed away, my mother was visited at her New Jersey condominium by one of her favorite nephews, who drove down to visit from Canada.

Something happened–as I recall, it was a misunderstanding over a condominium parking space that my cousin was using. In trying to sort this out, the son of a friend of my mother’s became enraged and suddenly, without warning, punched my cousin in the face, knocking him down.

What Do I Do on the 31st Day?

1 Comment / Worry / By Julie A. Dickson

I stare at the prescription bottle with instructions: Take once a day. Pill count-30. Refill until this date, the following year. I have a heart condition, Hypertrophic Obstructive Cardiomyopathy (HOCM), and I need the pills to decrease the blood pressure to and from my heart.

How Poetry Broke My Heart

33 Comments / Stories / By Cortney Davis

On June 2, 2010, I was giving a poetry reading at the faculty club at Columbia University Medical Center in New York as part of their “Literature & Medicine” series. I still have the list of poems I read that day, poems that spoke of my work as a nurse practitioner. One poem described my examination of an abused woman; another recounted the experience of a young teen, raped by her sister’s boyfriend. Other poems concerned the mysteries surrounding death as well as the joys of healing.

Somewhere halfway through the reading, I developed what is aptly called crushing chest pain.

Girls Become Doctors

Leave a Comment / Sexism / By Olapeju Simoyan

When I was in medical school, one of our female attending physicians told us her young son had once been asked if he wanted to be a doctor when he grew up. “No,” he replied. “Only girls are doctors!”

DOH Calling

Leave a Comment / visuals / By Anonymous

Healing

Leave a Comment / Poems / By Cheryl Byler Keeler

When I thought I might die,
not eventually, but very
soon, I treated me more kindly,

as if I were my own child,
the girl I was, and the woman
I am, all melded

my stethoscope

1 Comment / Haiku / By Tiffany Rose Jenkins

No Chill Pill?

Leave a Comment / Fatigue / By Julie A. Dickson

They have pills for everything it seems, but not a chill pill.

When I was young, I would often look up to see my mother’s concerned face outlined in the kitchen window, knocking, beckoning me into the house. “Quickly,” she’d say, leading me to the sink where she immersed my wrists into cold water, while draping a wet hand towel over the back of my neck. This was a normal occurrence for me: getting overheated, face red, white around my lips. “Sit in front of the fan,” my mother would say, as the headache started.

The Water I Swam In

2 Comments / Sexism / By Andrea Gordon

The dad who drove me home after babysitting seemed surprised when I said I planned to be premed. After a pause he said, “Well, you’ve been oppressed for hundreds of years, so you should have an easier time getting into med school.” My brain froze. All I could think was “I’m only 17. What is he talking about?”

My Story, Not Yours

Leave a Comment / Healing / By Mary B. Wiecezak

I entered her room and introduced myself in the usual fashion. Jennie and Mike welcomed my visit. I explained that I wrote “patient stories” at the hospital and asked if they would enjoy telling me about themselves. They readily agreed.

Mike explained that Jennie’s vital organs were shutting down. Together they agreed to hospice care for her that morning.

Mistaken Identity

Leave a Comment / Sexism / By Jennifer Caputo-Seidler

The rooms on the observation unit are small, so as I rounded with my team, we were forced to encircle the patient’s bed to fit in the space. I, her attending physician, stood at the right side of the head of the bed as one resident, two interns, and three medical students took their places around the bed. She looked at our group and asked who was present. Before I could introduce each team member, she looked at me in my long white coat and attending physician ID badge and remarked, “Clearly, you’re my nurse.”