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

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

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Dr. Sarno Saved Me!

Back in the 1980s, I was not a family physician but an engineering manager who had been experiencing occasional back pain for several years. Then one summer I overdid it windsurfing, and for the next two and a half months I was bent over in sheer, excruciating pain that I now recognize was a muscle spasm that would not remit.
 
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Just a Little Twist

The ache was in a familiar spot: in my mid thorax, starting over my spine and spreading a little to each side. It showed up a few times a year, always in the same place. It wasn’t terrible. I went to work, shopped for groceries, walked the dog, kept living my life. Maybe I woke up more often at night. Okay, maybe I woke up every hour and maybe sometimes I had trouble getting back to sleep. And maybe I had to cut back on the ibuprofen because it added epigastric pain to my back pain. But it wasn’t bad.

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Her Father’s Back

I first saw “Mary” as I entered the exam room. She was lying on the table in tears, complaining of a three-year history of excruciating back pain. She had seen two neurosurgeons and an orthopedist (my specialty), had had an MRI and, despite great hesitancy on the part of the neurosurgeon, had had a (failed) back surgery: her pain had been relieved for three days before it recurred exactly as it had been before.  Following a second MRI, she had been referred to me because the neurosurgeon thought I was a “pain specialist,” whereas really I was interested in mind-body

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Not Even Forty…

His wife left him that morning. That’s what he told the police officer who arrived on the scene after his large truck plowed into the back of my little red car. “I wasn’t paying attention. I was speeding up as I hit her.”

Ahead of us, an elderly woman had disobeyed her doctor’s orders not to drive while on pain medication. She decided to make a left turn by cutting off multiple lanes of traffic. My brakes held as all my weight went into them. I had less than a second to be thankful for missing her.

As I was

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An Editor’s Invitation: My Aching Back

Back pain is as common as rain. It’s one of the most frequent concerns that patients bring to me as a family physician.
And I can identify with that pain–at least a little bit.
I had back pain as a teenager. I remember going to see a doctor about it. She examined me, took a pointless X-ray and then offered me something priceless: reassurance. “You’re a muscular guy,” she said, even though I weighed a scrawny 120 pounds.
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Yellow Froth

He routinely slept through the day, sedating himself into a stupor with alcohol, benzodiazepine, hypnotics, and narcotic pills — some obtained legally from doctors, some bought on the internet from India — so the fact that he slept long into the afternoon did not alarm me much at first. I checked on him throughout the day just to make sure he was still alive.

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Teeter Totter

I am the only adult child of an alcoholic nurse. Well, he was a nurse, until alcohol took everything. He stopped going to work because they kept sending him home due to alcohol withdrawals. He didn’t renew his nursing license, and that was how he ultimately lost his career. He also lost his house, his car, his relationships, and his health.
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If It Kills Me, It Kills Me

He was my doppelganger: where I could go if I chose drink over life. I was his advocate, supporter, commiserator. I supported him in his choice to drink himself to death, and it was one of the hardest and most meaningful journeys I have had with any of my clients. I will always be proud of the fact that I was able to bring together a team that supported his right to live life on his own terms.

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I Confess

I confess. I would drive drunk on nights I went clubbing. I’d dance until my knees hurt and drink until the brand of gin in my drinks didn’t matter. With my windows rolled down, I hoped fresh air conjured some semblance of sobriety, in case I encountered a cop. I’d bellow my favorite songs, head hanging out the window. Me. An R.N.
In December 1996, I walked into my urban ICU, before color-coded uniforms, wearing my home-made Santa Claus scrub top, and found myself assigned to T.J. Dalton, a 30-year old victim of a drunk driver. The driver was

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Irony

“Two men walk into a bar…” You know that joke, don’t you, with its endless variations? The one that is followed by a groan, often told by your beloved dad and uncles? Well, I have a different one to tell.

Two women walked separate routes in life: painful, exhausting, circuitous. One was a model-turned-realtor, the other a doctor. They knew each other once, although they were never friends, and then they were separated by geography and time. They never thought about one another again.

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Amazing What a Naive Medical Student Can Do

I was a third-year medical student on a scholarship trying to make a few extra bucks in order to survive. So I applied for a job as the overnight lab technician at a local community hospital. My job required that I go to the ER when they called for labs, draw the blood from the patient, take the specimen back to the lab, run the tests, and then go back to the ER and deliver the results. Which was fine.
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