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Latest Voices
Message of Honor
Just before my father died, a perceptive, insightful hospice nurse arranged for a group of young army veterans to visit his bedside and read him a military message of honor. Dressed in full uniform, the men read a formal letter of appreciation for my father’s service during the Korean War.
My father was very weak after several months of treatment for glioblastoma. When the men saluted him, my father raised a shaky arm to salute them back. It took a long time for his hand to reach his forehead, but it did. The men waited patiently by the side of
Finding Moral Courage
It began in junior high when a group of neighborhood girls decided they were better than the rest of us. They wrote a song about their looks and personalities; they sang this every morning on the bus to school and every afternoon on the return trip home. These girls made me feel worthless and invisible.
I wish I had had the guts to stand up on the bus and silence them by telling them the harm they were causing. But I didn’t have that moral courage.
April More Voices: Guts
Dear readers,
When I think about which parts of my medical training required guts, what pops into my head is my very first clinical rotation: surgery.
You might think that I’d have been most fearful of what I’d encounter in the operating room–spurting blood and writhing intestines.
In truth, the thing that roiled my own guts was the hour that I’d have to report. The thought of getting up at 4:30 AM–to shower, dress, have breakfast, catch a bus to the hospital and trudge to the surgical ICU–filled me with despair.
Read More »Translucent
For thirty years, I worked on other people’s crises: fighting at 3:00 a.m. for an inpatient bed, sitting with families as addiction took another son, pushing for emergency housing, walking into nursing homes rank with neglect. I lived in a visible world of action and consequence.
The end came in my home office. Even behind the flat safety of a screen, I could no longer hold the frame of a telehealth call. My body became a lead weight sinking into the chair, pulled down by a force I couldn’t name. The pain on my face was a map I could
That One Event
It was the summer I was hated. Living in North Carolina, where they still called it the War Between the States, my Yankee accent stood out. Pending my schedule I trained as a community organizer by day or went door-to-door canvassing money for social change in the evenings. To pay my rent I worked a rotating schedule as triage receptionist in the Emergency Room. I was the one asking your name, address, and insurance, asking you to spell things for me, telling you to move your car out of the ambulance bay.
Read More »Mr. B
I couldn’t help but gag at the stench in the room. Mr. B greeted me with a smile.
“Pretty disgusting isn’t it. Rotting flesh. The smell. Nothing like it. Your mask won’t help you much.” He gave a loud chortle as though he had told the funniest joke ever.
The year was 1965. I was a student nurse. This was my first encounter with gangrene.
Jet Fuel
Not many people can say they are comforted by the smell of jet fuel. But I can.
I was working as a new medical scribe in the emergency department when a crew of flight nurses rushed in with a trauma patient. As they passed by me, in uniforms I recognized, the scent of jet fuel whisked me back to some of my most cherished childhood memories.
When I was growing up, my dad was a flight nurse. My mom sometimes brought us kids to the base during his 24-hour shifts so we could eat lunch with him. If we were
A Back-Broken But Whole Life
I was on a blind date, a week short of turning 21, when the Triumph I was riding in crashed into a light pole on the Bronx River Parkway. My date thought the car was burning and rushed around to pull me out; the door was locked, and by the time he got back to the driver’s seat he realized the car with spewing steam, not smoke, so he just held me still.
When the ambulance got me to the hospital, it turned out I had jackknifed over the lap belt and broken my back.
Read More »Apprenticeship to Waiting
I write this in a gap in the clinic. My patient, Ms. A, a recurrent non-attender, is running late.
The last time she came, Ms. A sat very still while I watched the tremor in her left hand. “Is it Parkinson’s?” she asked, before we had really begun.
Now, I wait for her return, for her test results, for her disease to reveal itself. In neurology it sometimes feels as though I am in apprenticeship to waiting, learning its rhythms from the patients I see.
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More Visuals
Blossom After the Storm
Transitions
Searching Uselessly for Food
Supply Closet Series
The First Time I Learned About “DNR”
Etherized Pietà
To Find Comfort
Remembering My Patients
The Healing Power of Focus Stacking
