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Stories
Conundrum
Matthew Hirschtritt
Walking from an exam room to the nurse’s station in the small outpatient clinic where I worked as a second-year medical student, I paused by a window to gaze out at the winter sunset. After a moment, I looked down to scan the notebook where I kept my schedule and notes for my last patient of the day.
4:15, Ms. Smith, 26, lump on groin–the bare bones of a story waiting to be filled in.
Feeling tired and looking forward to dinner, I sighed dramatically, dropped into a chair in front of a computer console and called up Ms. Smith’s electronic health record.
Like most medical records,
Mementos and Memories
Paul Rousseau
Delores sits tilted to the right in a worn wheelchair, a curtain separating her from a sleeping roommate.
She is wearing a blue blouse stained with something orange, perhaps Jell-O, and white pants and white socks. A worn gold wedding band adorns the fourth finger of her left hand. Her hair is a shiny gray, perfectly coiffed, and her face is etched with deep wrinkles, a testament to eighty-nine years of life.
A tiny bedside shelf displays two faded black-and-white photos from the 1930s or ’40s: one is of Delores in her twenties, a demure smile on her face; the other shows Delores with a young man
On the Bottom Rung
I was in my third year of medical school, and the initial week of my first-ever hospital clerkship had passed without incident. I showed up on time, did what I was told, stepped on no toes and followed my patients as well as I could.
At the close of that week, however, my intern pulled me aside to ask, “Remember learning how to put an IV in a mannequin during the workshop earlier today? Well, there’s a patient in radiology, waiting for a CT scan. The tech can’t flush the IV, and I need you to do it. If you can’t, put in a new one.”
Tech? Flush? I meditated on my intern’s words and realized that this would be my first unsupervised procedure.
A Passage in India
Justin Sanders
“It’s cooler this morning,” I said to Seema, as we left the hospital grounds en route to our home visits.
It was a bright and bustling morning in Trivandrum, the capital of India’s southwesternmost state, Kerala. A third-year resident in family medicine, I had come here to work with the staff of an Indian nonprofit devoted to advancing palliative care services across India. Seema was a young, newly qualified junior doctor who had only recently joined the organization. We were traveling with five others–our driver, two nurses and two nursing trainees–into the mountains east of Trivandrum for the day.
“We don’t really speak about the weather like you do,” Seema gently chided. “In the West you spend lots of time talking about the
Hospital Librarian
Pam Kress-Dunn
Some people seem surprised to find a library in a hospital. But it’s here, and so am I. Having been a librarian in lots of different libraries–public, academic, archival–I jumped at this job when it opened up. Little did I know what I was getting into.
Like many medical librarians, I work solo. I do have a volunteer who, despite being decades older than me, works tirelessly during the two days a week she’s here. But I’m the one who does the lit searches, tracks down the articles in medical journals and finds the piece of information the doctor requires before the surgery that’s scheduled for noon.
Little Lady
Samyukta Mullangi
Growing up, I was the one thought to be the most squeamish about medicine–the needles, the knives, the musty smell of alcohol swabs and the rusty stench of blood. Whenever my mother, an ob/gyn, talked on the phone with her patients about menstruation, cramps and bloating, I’d plug my ears and wish for death by embarrassment. Once, standing in line for a routine TB test, I had a friend pull up a chair for me “in case you faint.”
So my entire family thought it hilarious when I decided to go to medical school.
“You know that residents practice stitches on each other, don’t you?” my cousin teased.
“Consider real estate instead,” my grandmother advised.
In deference to her, I actually did go
Just This Once
Majid Khan
It’s a rainy Thursday evening in our small inner-city practice. Today is the receptionist’s birthday, and I’ve been cordially invited to attend a small party prepared by her coworkers.
As I descend the green carpeted steps to the lounge, my aching muscles remind me about the torture session (otherwise known as “boxercise”) that I attended last night in my ongoing effort to get fit and control my weight. I still feel slightly resentful of Robert, the trainer; when he caught me slacking off during sit-ups, he embarrassed me in front of the class by making me repeat them.
Good job I didn’t tell him about those two
Genuine Touch
Jonathan Gotfried
I was a medical student doing my fourth-year rotation on the oncology floor. The floor offered many new sights, and from the first, I was struck by the two mammoth massage chairs sitting in a corner at the end of the longest corridor.
Their exaggerated curves were plastered with jet-black faux leather adorned with stitching details. Long, smooth armrests of oak jutted out on either side. The remote control was a virtual supercomputer offering thousands of programs designed to enhance one’s massaging pleasure–kneading, fast, pressure, heat, full-body massage. On either side of the plush headrest, strategically placed speakers would play soft classical music, drowning out the low hum of
Medicine Land Celebrates a Birthday
Paul Gross
The first real patient of my medical career was a 60-year-old man in the surgical intensive care unit. I met him on the first day of the third year of medical school, when students join teams of doctors doing inpatient medicine.
The surgical team met at 7:00 am–a ludicrously early hour, I thought. There were nearly ten of us–four students, a couple of interns and senior residents and a chief resident.
As the team gathered around the patient’s bed, we students hung back, looking at the form before us. A pale, fleshy foot poked out from under his hospital gown. The room smelled funny.
The patient was comatose. Had he been awake and alert, he might not have been heartened by our team’s
