A pacemaker and defibrillator
Sheets pressed hard with suffering
Seven fingers and one arm, gangrenous dead
Unknown liters of blood
Failed kidneys
As a pulmonary and critical-care medicine fellow, I care for patients with a broad variety of respiratory ailments. But little did I know, as I examined my patient Mr. Smith in the outpatient pulmonary clinic this past winter, that I’d see him again only months later as my first patient with COVID-19.
Mr. Smith was tough as nails. A stoic retired steelworker and former smoker, he suffered from significant emphysema, but was inclined–by nature and
Holland M. Kaplan ~
I’m sitting in the ICU team room, staring at the computer, trying to look like I’m writing a note. But my head is pounding.
As an internal-medicine resident doing my first month of residency, I’ve found the ICU of the bustling county hospital a jarring place to start my training. Although I’d anticipated the clinical challenge of caring for very ill ICU patients, I was unprepared for the emotional
Linda E. Clarke
Once upon a long eighteen years ago, I got sick.
I was just finishing ten years of hospital-based ethics work, and at first I thought that the work had made me sick. I thought that the stress of hearing so many difficult stories, of witnessing so much suffering, was hurting me. I was wrong.
I was sick from a growth in my brain.
The growth was found after
Jessica Sandek
About the artist:
A native New Yorker, Jessica has been using art as her language of expression for most of her life. She earned her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and now lives in the mountains of Southern California, where she
Sara Rempe
and white cotton, soaping, rinsing,
lifting her body to sponge
her swollen skin. We were
there when they cleaned her
of diarrhea, sliding an arm
under her when she struggled to move
she’d groan, suck in, drop–
limbs like thin shoots
of
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