It has been said that we in health care carry a backpack of sorrows.
There is a sanctity to being on the inside, trusted to care for people in their weakest, darkest and most vulnerable moments. When it feels like control is gone, we steady our voices even when we too feel scared.
During my sophomore year of college, I hit my personal low. I was drowning in depression and anxiety. Simply making it through the day was a feat in itself. I lacked purpose, and I even questioned my will to live. Hope seemed just beyond my grasp.
Marilyn Barton
“Nursing students needed to work in the University Hospital, good pay, orientation.”
As a rising nursing-school senior in the 1970s, I naïvely applied for the job above without getting the full details. No one mentioned that I’d be working in a psychiatric unit housing twenty-five aggressive, catatonic or schizophrenic patients, many of whom had been locked away for years.
The entrance sign, which should have read “Locked Psych/Med/Surg Unit,” said simply “5 East.”
On my first evening shift, I overheard two nurses discussing how to monitor a new patient, transferred from the federal psych facility across town.
“Can we get the student to do it?” said one.
Warren Holleman
We’re sitting in a circle: seven women and me. Most are in their thirties and forties, and in their second, third or fourth month of sobriety. They look professional in the suits they’ve assembled from the donations closet of our inner-city recovery center.
I start things off by reminding everyone that this is the last day of the group. The last hour, in fact.
All eyes turn to Dorothy.
Dorothy is a proud woman, tall and tough and strong. And a former track and field star, although now she’s wheelchair-bound.
She speaks in a deep, husky, monotone punctuated occasionally by dramatic earthquakes–otherwise known as spastic tremors. But in all this time, she’s avoided talking about herself, fueling the suspicion that she’s hiding something
Stanley H. Schuman
In Aramaic scripture*, and Aboriginal Dreamtime.
How else could animal life begin
Except by Divine Breath, oxygen-enriched?
How ingenious! Only two atoms: O2,
Ideal for hemoglobin, mitochondria,
Neurotransmitters, ideal for fight or flight, for vocalizing,
For clever humans to shape tools, split atoms,
Compose opera, sow seeds, harvest grain.
Consider my distress, in my just-opened pediatric office.
Stumped by Angela, a three-year-old
So panicked by my white coat, no way to examine her.
Screaming, clutching Mother, she knew and I knew
This wasn’t university-hospital, with back-up nurses.
Instead, it was one-on-one,
Advantage Angela.
Desperate, I felt for a stray balloon in my
Pants pocket (from my own child’s birthday).
Putting it to my lips, I strained to inflate the stubborn thing.
Instantly,
Amy Cooper Rodriguez
It’s been almost ten years since Esther died, and I still think of her almost every day. I was her physical therapist at a rehabilitation hospital. My patients had many different diagnoses–head injury, stroke, multiple sclerosis, hip or knee replacements. I was in my early twenties. I thought that if I tried hard enough, I could help everyone. And often, I could.
“What are you going to do to me?” Esther asked, looking up from her hospital chair.
I laughed and pulled up a chair. “I’m Amy, your physical therapist. I’m not going to do anything to you. I’m here to help you get back to doing things you miss.”
Esther smoothed her long skirt over
Karen Myers
“I can feel the life force leaving me,” Mike says as he massages my legs with his rough, careful hands. He doesn’t use oil or lotion like the other massage therapists. Just his sticky, Marlboro-scented fingers. I lie in my underwear beneath a green sheet. My bony shoulder blades and crooked spine press into the table, having long since lost their cushion of muscle.
“We’re getting older,” Mike says, even though we’ve barely reached forty. “Maybe that’s why we’re so afraid. We don’t have the energy to fight like we used to.”
Mike’s eyes bulge like a bullfrog’s. When I first knew him, I found them a bit frightening. His voice is raspy and deep. He has a fading tattoo on his left
Jennifer Frank
“You’re a real piece of work!” he spat at me. He was a patient named Martin; I was the supervising physician, trying to role-model for a second-year resident how to conduct a difficult conversation with patients like this.
So far, not so good.
At first glance, Martin seemed an ordinary-looking older man, with close-cut gray hair and plain-framed eyeglasses. But I was struck by his scowl–he was expecting an argument, perhaps because during his interview with the resident he’d already encountered some pushback.
He’d brought a long list of laboratory tests that his biofeedback “doctor” had instructed him to get, saying that his fatigue and other symptoms were caused by “adrenal dysfunction.”
I scanned the list–thyroid, blood count, chemistries, vitamins, adrenal function. “Testing
I pulled back the plunger, sucking lidocaine from the bottle into the syringe as I prepared to lance Jimmy’s abscess. A voice in my head kept repeating, like a mean-spirited parrot, that I’d never done this procedure before–not even under supervision, and certainly not by myself…
I’d met Jimmy two months earlier. He’d come into our clinic with a fever, shortness of breath, a horrible cough, and a crumpled paper photocopy of a chest x-ray taken at another clinic. They’d diagnosed pneumonia and given him a course of antibiotics.
But now a month later, still coughing and drenched in sweat every night, he’d come to see us. He was pale, perspiring, exhausted and in pain.
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