Page 159 – Pulse

Quantum Tunneling

Leave a Comment / visuals / Kate Levenberg

Kate Levenberg

About the artist:

Kate Levenberg is a second-year medical student at Penn State University.

About the artwork:

“This painting speaks to that mysterious understanding that there’s energy around us that we can’t quite perceive. The energy that we just know we will never be smart enough to accurately describe. That faint idea that time might not be linear, that our perception is imperfect, and that the earth will keep revolving long after my energy has dissipated.“

Visuals editor:

Sara Kohrt

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Assistance

Destiny and the Socks

Leave a Comment / Animals / Naomi Bernstein

“Destiny, look!” I threw a ball of black socks in our orange tabby cat’s direction. He examined the socks quizzically for a moment, until their scent hit his nostrils. Then the corners of his mouth turned upward and his expression revealed great happiness. He buried his nose in the socks before batting them around and around the kitchen.

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Canine Comfort

Leave a Comment / Animals / Ronna L. Edelstein

According to family legend, my mother took me for a walk in my stroller on one of those dog days of summer–high humidity, flopping flowers, lackadaisical leaves. I was happily singing along with the birds when a neighbor’s demonic dog rushed my stroller and tried to Eskimo-kiss me with its snout. I screamed, the dog howled, and thus began my lifelong fear of all furry, four-legged Fidos.

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Right Coat Ceremony

11 Comments / Stories / Shadi Ahmadmehrabi

Shadi Ahmadmehrabi ~

It was my first day of orientation at medical school. In a hallway stood a coat rack overflowing with white garments. I set down my accumulated papers, reached for a hanger and, for the first time ever, shrugged first one arm and then the other into a white coat.

It was too large, but I had no other options. The unisex coats ran from XXS to XXL, but the smallest had all been claimed.

As I clumsily buttoned my coat on the right (women’s coats button on the left), I couldn’t help seeing this as a physical reminder that, as my mentors had warned, medicine continues to be male-dominated, and that I’d need to pick my battles.

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veterans’ rugby

2 Comments / Haiku / Lew Watts

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That Is All

11 Comments / Poems / Scott Wilson

Scott Wilson ~

God,

Take her breath, still her heart, and
clean her body out with a spoon.
Wring her spirit in the river and
place her eyes beside the moon.

Fold up her memories in a dresser and
frame her smile in the sky.
Turn up her laughter in the darkness and
let her freckles start to fly.

Smoke her love out with tobacco and
sow her kindness into the seas.
Diffuse her voice upon the mountains and
pollinate her sorrow with the bees.

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Sunset

1 Comment / visuals / Mary T. Shannon

About the artist:

Mary T. Shannon is a psychotherapist specializing in using writing and art as adjunctive treatment tools. She recently completed her memoir For Girls Like Me and is now working on a short-story collection, All I’ve Ever Wanted to Say.

About the artwork:

“This photograph was taken in San Diego and is one I have looked at a lot recently, as my father-in-law is now in hospice care. The photo reminds me that death is part of life’s journey. Even as we splinter and dance around death, desperate to hang on or to let go, it is a common thread we all share.”

Visuals editor:

Sara Kohrt

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Four Floppy Ears

3 Comments / Miracles / Alyssa Brennan

He was my first encounter with a comatose patient.

How does one communicate with an unconscious body? With tubes and wires and braces. He was fragile. He’d suffered a diffuse nerve injury and faced an unknown prognosis, yet his family was pleading for a hint of recovery as we were preparing to transfer him to a rehabilitation facility later that day.

He lay motionless on the stretcher while I awaited the arrival of transport staff to wheel him away.

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Where’s My Cheeseburger?

Leave a Comment / Feeling Anxious / Marilyn Barton

“When’s dinner?” pleads my new patient, as the cardiac cath techs wheel him into the recovery unit. “I’ve had nothing since yesterday,” he adds. I’d love to bring him some prime rib and a glass of wine–but not at the expense of his life and my RN license.

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Deadlock

7 Comments / Stories / Zachary Reese

Zachary Reese ~

“Does a rock float on water?” I asked the haggard woman lying in the ICU bed.

I was an intern, in the first rotation of my medical residency, and Mrs. Jones had been my ICU team’s patient for the past week. Over that time, she’d looked more and more uncomfortable, constantly gesturing for her breathing tube to be removed.

Mrs. Jones tried to form words in response to my question, but the plastic tube in her mouth prevented it. Her chest rose and fell in rhythm with the ventilator’s hiss as the machine pumped air into her lungs; her muscles were too weak to do the work themselves.

After several attempts at speaking, she gave up and shook her head. No.

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Susceptible to Stroke?

3 Comments / Feeling Anxious / Nan Jackson

I have met a lot of anxious people in my professional work teaching math to adults. Ever calm and patient, I would work with math-anxious students to help them manage the often-overwhelming anxiety they felt trying to make sense of a subject I loved, trying to help them feel more at ease taking tests. We’d talk about strategies to help them relax their minds and bodies so they could access all the knowledge I knew they had inside.

As for myself, feeling anxious wasn’t part of who I thought I was.

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