How to Change a Diaper
The Color of Tears
“Hey Doctor Curly!”
“Hey Hungry Hippo!”
“You still haven’t gotten a haircut? Have you had one since your Bar Mitzvah?! What nice Jewish girl’s gonna go on a date with you with your hair that long?!”
A Mother’s Son
Hugh Silk
“Why do you want to go into family medicine?” my internal-medicine preceptor asked.
It was an innocent enough question. I’d known from day one of medical school what I wanted to do, so I answered with confidence, and perhaps a bit of a chip on my shoulder.
“I love being with people and getting to know them,” I said. “I’ve always been this way, so it makes sense that’s what
A Conversation About Race, Fear and Connection
Paul Gross
In the wake of recent events, many speak about the need for conversations about race. In our country, the implications of race are a moral issue, a humanitarian issue, a justice issue and, yes, a medical issue. (One need only examine how racial categorization affects rates of death.) But what would this conversation about race look like?
Today, Pulse’s editor provides one offering. In August, we’ll invite all Pulse readers to join
The Making of Me
I was the new doc in a small country town. I wanted to be accepted. I wanted to do best for my new patients.
She was the town matriarch. She had multiple chronic illnesses. She had the power to make me or break me.
Icy Cold
“Your hands are cold.”
I heard these words throughout my third year of medical school, the year during which we first touched patients on a routine basis.
My hands were cold. I was nervous; how could I not be? What a strange experience for me–asking strangers to disrobe, then touching their bare skin.
What Money Can Buy
Hind Almazeedi
Arwa arrives late to the clinic. Her husband is parked outside waiting for her.
“You missed your last two appointments,” I say, checking her records. It’s been four months.
“I didn’t have a ride,” she shrugs.
Many of my patients live close to the primary-care center in Kuwait where I work as a family physician, but the desert heat makes it impossible to come here on foot. Two minutes
What’s Love Got To Do With It?
H. Lee Kagan
My longtime patient Brenda let the top of her exam gown drop to her waist, stepped down off the exam table and turned to look at herself in the mirror. As I watched, she cupped her seventy-eight-year-old breasts in her palms and unceremoniously hoisted them up to where they’d probably resided when she was in her twenties.
“I’m thinking about having my boobs done,” she said. “My girlfriend had hers
Tough Love
Maria Gervits
I miss Alba. I don’t know why, but I do. She was the most challenging patient I’ve ever had. I dreaded seeing her in the office–and yet, somehow, she won me over.
Alba was fifty-nine, with short, silver hair, a deep, gravelly voice from decades of smoking, and an attitude. She had lung disease, heart disease, depression, arthritis and HIV. She also had a complicated social situation. She’d used cocaine and
Ritual Healing
Joseph Fennelly
In recent years the medical profession has witnessed a surge in burnout and depression among physicians and other health professionals. Efforts have been made to address this–for example, by offering Schwartz Center Rounds, in which caregivers openly and honestly discuss the social and emotional issues they face. Health professionals can also reduce stress through counseling, meditation or massage, or through practical steps such as cutting back on their working hours.
In
Denial
Kendra Peterson
July first Fellow,
a pager blares announcing
my initiating consult, a 29-year-old
(just my age)
malignant melanoma
and a first-time seizure
while receiving an infusion
of experimental treatment.
When I arrive
she’s already gotten
two milligrams of ativan
dilantin load is hanging
and I examine
a somnolent young woman
now coming ’round,
could be my friend, my
Special Delivery
Deborah Pierce
I first met Marie five years ago. A petite, soft-spoken woman in her thirties, she was the patient of one of the residents whom I supervise at our community hospital. Marie worked in housekeeping for a large corporation; she and her husband, a bus driver, had a six-year-old son. Now she was twenty-six weeks (six months) pregnant with their second child.
Marie’s blood pressure was markedly elevated (168/120), she had fairly
