
Keeping the Flame Alive
This month, at medical schools across the country, first-year students will officially don the physician’s traditional white coat for the first time.
The Second Law of Medicine
Sandra Relyea ~
I sit in the cab of an old pickup truck on my father’s farm, listening to the water gurgling through irrigation tubes alongside a field. The truck is parked next to a barbed-wire fence. I’m waiting for the water to reach the far side of the field so I can pull the tubes and reset them in the next field.
As I wait, I watch the setting sun turn the
Brave New World
Rosalind Kaplan
I think a lot about quitting medicine lately. A lot.
Then I have a morning like yesterday morning:
I see a patient I’ve known for more than twenty years, caring for him through an adrenal tumor, a major gastrointestinal surgery and now renal failure, for which he needs a kidney transplant. As we review his last set of labs (stable, thank goodness), he is sanguine, hopeful. He may have found a
Medical School
Holiday Night Shift
Lost in the Hospital
Christine Henneberg
It’s easy to get lost in the hospital. I’m only an intern, and already I know it like the hallways of my old high school, every doorway and doorknob. But overnight, as I float between the floors and the units, answering pages, I quickly lose track of where I am, what time it is, what day it is.
I am vaguely aware that I’m on the fifth floor, the top floor