Sounding the Alarm
For most medical students, the fourth year is a time of coming into our own. We’ve completed our clinical clerkships, passed our first board exam and begun applying to residencies in our hoped-for specialties.
We also get our first taste of independence as clinicians.
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Care Package from Afar
Within a week of the news about the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China, many people panicked and bought all the facemasks off the shelf. Over one of our lunch breaks, my colleague in the immunology department told me she recently sent a box of masks to her mother in New York, because the stores there ran out of masks. My colleague and I agreed that the panicked reaction to the virus in America is laughable. Those affected here would be properly quarantined, and it would take several weeks at least for the virus to fully spread. The countries adjacent to China had many more worries than we did, we agreed.
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The Spanish Flu Hits Home
I’m very sensitive to contagious illness; I have an almost nonfunctioning immune system. Even before the coronavirus, I wore masks on my limited outings and washed my hands often, telling people who were sick to come see me when well. But that’s not the story I want to tell.
At age twelve, my mother was hit by the flu of 1918, but recovered. When the same flu hit even more ferociously in 1919, she was the only one well in the home, due to her immunity. Her parents, grandparents and the three of her five sibs still living there all got sick.
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“I’m An Ass. Sue Me.”
Although my training, in both internal medicine and nephrology, was excellent, I was lamentably green for some time when it came to the practical aspects of medicine. I did, however, learn one lesson early on.
One day, I rose from my office chair to greet a new patient who walked in slowly, supported by a cane and holding the arm of a much younger man, who helped her into her seat before taking his. To me, she appeared to be “old,” because in those long-ago days I thought of anyone over sixty-five in such terms.
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Carpe Diem
I grew up hearing about the flu epidemic of 1918–and knowing how contagious disease can affect a family’s history. My 26-year-old paternal grandfather died in that epidemic; he left behind his 23-year-old wife and my dad, not quite three years old. This tragedy determined the trajectory of the lives of my beloved grandmother and dad; it left a hole in our family tree that no amount of time could ever fill.
An Editor’s Invitation: Contagion
We have entered a period of uncertainty and fear as a new coronavirus infects more people and makes its way around the globe and into our midst.
As an undergraduate, I read The Plague by Albert Camus and wondered what it would have been like to have lived in the time of the Black Death.
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Retirement, Hibernation, and Renewal
I retired from a deeply satisfying teaching career just before I turned sixty-five, having always thought I would keep teaching well into my seventies. The decision came in the aftermath of my parents’ illnesses and deaths.
The years between stroke and death for both my mother and father seem, with hindsight, to have been a time of accelerated aging for me, not so much in my legs and arms and feet as in my heart and brain. Not so much the aging that reaps wisdom but the aging that topples into vulnerability. The aging that makes it seem too hard to keep up with a challenging job, to keep giving my students the education they deserve. The aging that makes each ache or pain or worry that I would have shrugged off at a younger age feel like inevitable decline, a one-way street.
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Greetings and Salutations
I have seen tribesmen in the West African country of Mali meet each other on a narrow dirt path and stop to spend several minutes chanting highly scripted greetings. When they part, shortly afterwards, there is an equally elaborate farewell.
As a psychiatrist and medical educator, I’ve seen my colleagues carrying out a parallel ritual: Two doctors hurriedly passing each other in a hospital hallway and cheerily but tersely saying, “How are you?”–neither slowing down to hear the other’s response. The greeting is equally formalized; it’s just shorter.
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The Joy of Getting Older
Whenever I talk about getting older with those who are older than me, I see the same facial expression. I like to describe it as a scowl: a blank stare with a raised eyebrow. Every so often I get the sad droop of a head as it shakes side to side. Sometimes it’s even coupled with a smirk, seemingly saying: “Oh, child, you have no idea!”
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