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Go Ask Alice

10 Comments / Stories /

Ellen Rand

In 2010, I became a hospice volunteer.

My mother had died of a brain tumor five years earlier at age eighty-seven. I saw being a hospice volunteer as a way to express my gratitude for my mother’s compassionate hospice care and to help other caregivers to weather a loved one’s passing. And, as a former reporter and writer, I thought I could help people to write their life stories, if they were interested.

In short, I wanted to act on E.M. Forster’s words, which for me sum up the goal of hospice: “Only connect.”

I soon realized, though, that by the time most people come to hospice, they’re too ill and/or too demented to carry on a conventional conversation, much less to express complex thoughts about the arc and meaning of their lives.

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In Plain Sight #4

2 Comments / visuals /

Peter Kahn

About the artist: 

Peter Kahn is a third-year medical student at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He is interested in how stories are told by physicians and patients alike.

About the artwork:

“I took this photo as part of a series of portraits while doing clinical rotations in the Bronx, NY, with the intention of allowing patients to tell their stories in a way that they might not otherwise share with a healthcare provider. I wanted others in the medical community to get a sense of who these patients are when they are outside of the clinic or the ER, places where patients are viewed as sick or ‘needy.’ In these photographs, taken on these individuals’ own turf, our ‘patients’ can be themselves and tell their own stories through photographs. I collaborated with Daniel Akselrad on this series, in which we also gave those in our photographs a disposable camera, so they could capture

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A Sigh on Rounds

3 Comments / Poems /

Jerald Winakur

White coat, sterile gloves
my instrument dangling

but she finally died
after such a struggle–the young

always struggle so–
I listened to her chest

till it stopped then clicked
off the machine.

It sighed for us all as the air
drained out. And the moon

was still low in the sky
so large, so round–this

is a shape I know well–
and it hung there like a silver disc

auscultating the earth…
But I could no longer listen

as I sat on a night lawn
slowly moistening.

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Thirty Below

18 Comments / Stories /

Kristie Johnson

One cold February morning during my third year of medical school, I walked through the entrance of the rural hospital where I was doing a nine-month rotation, and made my way to the nurses’ station. Feeling the warmth return to my face, I set down my coat and bag and hung my stethoscope around my neck.

The charge nurse, Barb, waved me to her computer.

“Kristie, you have a patient.”

She shuffled through papers, grabbed a blank chart and placed the patient’s admission note on top. When she saw the name, her face fell.

“Ah, it’s Peggy.”

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Sick of Getting Sick

8 Comments / Stories /

I awoke one Saturday morning to a terribly familiar feeling–a tight, barky cough, fast breathing, severe shortness of breath and burning in my chest. Another severe asthma attack. I knew I was in trouble.

Twenty-three years ago, when I was an internal-medicine resident, I went to be evaluated for recurrent pneumonia. I wound up being diagnosed with cough-variant asthma. Most asthmatic patients wheeze; when my asthma is bad, I cough.

I now realize that I’ve probably had asthma all my life. When I was a child, though, cough-variant asthma wasn’t recognized as a disease, at least not in the small upstate New York town where I was raised. So, instead, I was the “sickly child”–the one who got a cold with a cough that lingered for a month, who missed thirty days of school each year, who was teased for being smaller than the other kids and who, in high-school, coughed furiously after every cross-country running practice.

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weighting keppler

Weighting

2 Comments / visuals /

Hannah Keppler

About the artist: 

Hannah is a second-year medical student at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, NY. Her commitment to global health began while working as an undergraduate with Universities Allied for Essential Medicines. It has since taken her around the world–in 2013 to Geneva, Switzerland, as a participant in the World Health Assembly, and more recently to Uganda, with Doctors for Global Health, where she worked to expand village health worker and community nutrition programs. She is passionate about women’s health and family planning.

About the artwork:

“I took this picture while conducting nutrition screening in a village in the Kisoro district of Uganda. These five children were waiting their turns to be weighed and measured; the village health worker, a translator and I recorded the information. The scale required kids to hang from it, like a swing. It was a challenge keeping them still. Many kicked and screamed, making the scale

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The Cancer Center

9 Comments / Poems /

Nancy Tune

First impression: New and well appointed,
staffed by friendly people and my favorite, irony.
In the clinic hallway a woman plays a harp.
I have come to learn about the process of
my dying; surely this is meant to shake me
free of dread and make me laugh. It doesn’t, quite.

During treatment: I know where to go,
my focus straight ahead. Walkers,
wheelchairs, frightened people waiting in
the tasteful lobby. Down the stairs
I join a group of lonely people in a
silent prayer to gamma rays and science:
Please, some more time. Do not let us die, yet.

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Assaulted by “Health Care”

23 Comments / Stories /

Sandra Shea

I’m no stranger to dealing with the medical world and its billing systems. I’m a triple cancer survivor, had knee surgery in 2012 and now have ulcerative colitis. All told, I’ve had eleven surgeries and fourteen colonoscopies. Paperwork is practically my middle name.

But the last twenty-four hours have been ridiculous.

In that time, I’ve had three different encounters with healthcare billing–each absurd in its own way, and each more challenging than the last. Things got to where I almost had to laugh. And if almost $10,000 of my money hadn’t been at stake, I would have.

Yesterday morning and early afternoon were punctuated by the following events:

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Ensign Medical Maze

Medical Maze

2 Comments / visuals /

 

Josephine Ensign

About the artist: 

Josephine Ensign teaches health policy and narrative medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her literary non-fiction essays have appeared in The Sun, The Oberlin Alumni Magazine, Pulse, Silk Road, The Intima, The Examined Life Journal, Johns Hopkins Public Health Magazine, and in the nonfiction anthology, I Wasn’t Strong Like This When I Started Out: True Stories of Becoming a Nurse (Lee Gutkind, Ed.). She writes the health policy and nursing blog Medical Margins.

About the artwork:

“This photograph is of an endless hospital hallway in the University of Washington Medical Center Health Sciences Building, where I teach and where I ended up as an inpatient in 2000, partially paralyzed by acute transverse myelitis. Even after twenty years of working in the giant academic medical complex (6 million square feet or so), I still find the medical maze literally and figuratively disorienting. I take photographs to interact with and inform my writing.”

Visuals editor:

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