I’m not sure why I scrawl quotation marks around the word “dead” when it should be bolded or underlined.
During a regular physical two years ago, my internist offhandedly commented that he’d heard lung sarcoidosis can recur. I smiled to myself as I thought how strange he should mention that, exactly fifty years since my own diagnosis with the disease. I remembered its onset as if it were yesterday—bronchitis, Bell’s palsy, the painful bumps of erythema nodosum, general respiratory symptoms, and a positive skin test.
My subconscious is wiser than I am, and I’ve learned to pay attention to what awakens me at 3 a.m. Maybe others have had that experience, too ― no patient, no friend, no one ― has ever complained when I call (after sunrise) and start with, “I woke up this morning thinking about you.”
Part of why the subconscious is wise, I think, is because it gets to work in a brain that has slowed down from the too-busyness of the day. In the stillness of the night, it asks, “What about this?”
Even as a child, I realized that the only constant in life was change. That recognition brought me angst, resulting in many panic attacks. I am a person who likes routine. I am a person who likes to know what tomorrow will bring.
Dear Pulse readers,
I think it’s fair to say that we’re living in uncertain times.
A pandemic, urgent calls for racial justice and an election year all cry for our attention against a backdrop of global warming. The stakes are high. The outcomes are still unknown.
At the same time, in our personal lives, we need to make choices based on the information at hand. It’s not always easy.
Jack’s schizophrenia prevented him from understanding the importance of taking antibiotics for a diabetic leg ulcer. As a student nurse, I was caring for him on the psychiatric unit where I worked. Based on his olive skin, Jack may have been of Greek descent. Average height and weight, he had thinning black hair, beady eyes, and a hooked nose. Jack’s face remained expressionless, and he usually kept his head down, shoulders hunched.
He’d been found wandering the streets, years ago, so we didn’t know much about him. Jack rarely spoke, and I wondered if he’d suffered a trauma earlier in
I was a brand new pediatrician, the most junior faculty member in a medical college in India. The typical diagnoses were different from most that I’d seen in my residency, which meant that every case was like a puzzle. But I was enjoying the challenge, as it led to lots of interaction with faculty in other departments.
I’d been an activist and in protests since college. But this felt “low risk” compared to standing up as a medical student to the hierarchy of medical education.
Atlanta, 2004. I’m seated next to a stranger at a large table at my brother’s home; I know no one there except my brother and his family. My son stayed back in New York with his dad, and my daughter was playing in another room. When the woman next to me hears where I am from, she mentions that she had once lived across the river from me. I knew her town well.
“It was nice there,” she said. “But’”–she lowered her voice–“we had to move.”
I knew why right away, but I had to hear it from her. “Oh?”
I remember my mother referring to me from early childhood on as “stubborn as a mule.” That trait has held me in good stead when dealing with authority figures or doctors who have tried to talk me into doing something I knew wasn’t right.
The event I remember most, though, comes from my grammar school years. A girl in our class was “retarded” (the term used then), as was her mother. She came to school with her hair uncombed, clothes dirty, and wearing no underpants. Each day at recess a group of boys encouraged her to go on the hanging
In 1970 I was a twenty-two-year-old first-year medical student riding down from New Haven with my classmates and our medical school dean to Washington, DC to join other medical students lobbying members of Congress to end the war in Vietnam. The organizers had arranged for us students to sleep on the floor of some dorm rooms at Georgetown University, which we did. (The dean, I am sure, did much better than that.)
The year was 1997, or thereabouts. She called on an otherwise slow day in the AIDS service agency I had started and was running on fumes and prayers. Her name was Mary.
Mary’s voice was trembling. She had been raped, and beaten, and feared she had AIDS. I knew she needed medical attention, so I got into my car to find her house, a tiny home next to the railroad tracks.
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