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Popping the Question

34 Comments / Stories /

Mitch Kaminski

Mr. Dwyer isn’t my patient, but today I’m covering for my partner in our family-practice office, so he’s been slipped into my schedule.

Reading his chart, I have an ominous feeling that this visit won’t be simple.

A tall, lanky man with an air of quiet dignity, Mr. Dwyer is eighty-eight. His legs are swollen, and merely talking makes him short of breath.

He suffers from both congestive heart failure and renal failure. It’s a medical catch-22: when one condition is treated and gets better, the other condition gets worse. His past year has been an endless cycle of medication adjustments carried out by dueling specialists and punctuated by emergency-room visits and hospitalizations.

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Community Medicine

9 Comments / Poems /

Kendra Fleagle Gorlitsky

Are you going to take that long with all the patients?
   Depends. If they’re really sick, I’ll have to.
I’m just saying…there are a lot waiting.
   Well, this one tried to kill herself last year. And today she’s really hurting.

I wanted a full physical, and I heard this is just a check-up, but I’ve been waiting over two hours!
   Could you put this gown on, please. What are you worried about?
I can’t find work that doesn’t make me lift, but I can’t lift.
   Can you swim?
Never learned.
   What was your favorite job?

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LhommeBlessesSelfPortrait 1992 Gallo

L’Homme Blessé (Self-Portrait)

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Peter Gallo

About the artist: 

Peter Gallo is an artist and writer based in Vermont. He has a PhD in art history and has worked as a psychiatric social worker for many years. His work is collected internationally; he is represented by Anthony Reynolds Gallery in London and by Zieher, Smith & Horton in New York City, where his work is currently appearing in a show entitled “Take Back Vermont.”

About the artwork:

“L’Homme Blessé” (Self-Portrait): Oil on printed linen on wood frame, 46.9 x 57.1 cm

“L’Homme Blessé” (The Wounded Man) is the title of a self-portrait by Gustave Courbet. Painted between 1844 and 1854, it was part of a cycle of self-portraits by the artist, who was still a young man. I became fascinated with these paintings during the time of my doctoral dissertation, while exploring the impact of clinical science on artistic experience since the eighteenth century. What strikes me about this cycle of

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I’m Happy

10 Comments / Stories /

Raymond Abbott

On my voice mail is a message from Donald Wyatt. He doesn’t often call, but every Monday morning he comes to see me at the Louisville, Kentucky, mental-health clinic where I’m a social worker.

His message is brief: “I’m not feeling well, and I am planning a trip to either St. Louis or Elizabethtown.”

I smile, wondering at the odd pairing. Elizabethtown is a small city of 50,000 people. And, well, St. Louis is St. Louis, a metropolis.

This behavior is not unusual for Donald. He’s disappeared before, always out of state and by bus. He doesn’t have the money to travel any other way, although once he took his parents’ van and drove to Ohio. (He has no driver’s license.) Never before, however, has he called beforehand.

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Casting Out Demons

14 Comments / Stories /

Jef Gamblee

As I stand beside the bed in Mr. Jerome’s living room, his pit bull puppy sniffs the body bag lying on a stretcher nearby. His cat curls up on the bedside shelf.

“That dog gonna be a problem?” asks Jude, one of the crematory guys.

“She might get underfoot,” says the neighbor, whose name I can’t remember. “But she’s a lover, not a fighter.”

Jude and Chuck are here to pick up Mr. Jerome, who died of prostate cancer today. His body lies on the bed–the wasted husk of a once lively, athletic man who had taught history in a New Jersey middle school.

I’m a hospice chaplain; Mr. Jerome was my client. I’d known him for about six months.

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Kahn Image 4

In Plain Sight #3

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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 their stories outside of our time together.”

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Teaching the Wound

14 Comments / Poems /

Joanne M. Clarkson

                    For LS

Assume pain, I tell them, the young, the
minimum-waged, those who work the midnight
shift with no chance for stars. We lean
over the bed of a 93-year-old man with advanced
Parkinson’s disease. His face is
frozen, even his eyes don’t seem to move
unless you watch the sheen. These

student aides are to turn him, bathe and lotion
his stiffened limbs. After they roll him silent
and awkward as a rug, I notice the bandage
discolored with seepage, covering his left
calf. The notes had not mentioned

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Friday Before Christmas

8 Comments / Stories /

Deborah Pierce

On the Friday before Christmas, I received an unusual gift.

Like any job, being a primary-care physician has both challenges and rewards. The challenges are many, and the rewards are often fleeting–a smile or a “thank you” from a patient or coworker, for instance. And I’ve found that being a teacher of medical students and residents brings an additional layer of rewards and challenges.

One Friday before Christmas, these arrived in an especially potent mix.

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dying in sanders

Dying for Change

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About the artist: 

Justin Sanders trained as a family doctor and is now pursuing a career in palliative care. He has written stories for Pulse and serves as its visuals editor. Having studied art history and worked in the fine arts, he has a deep faith in their healing power. Justin and his wife live in Boston. When not tending to their ten-month-old daughter, Cecily, Justin loves to mess up recipes from a growing cookbook collection and to read The New Yorker.

About the artwork:

“On December 10, hundreds of medical students around the country held ‘die-ins’ to protest racist criminal policing and our broken criminal justice system and also to acknowledge and mourn the lives of black men, such as Eric Garner and Michael Brown, who have died unecessarily at the hands of the police. The students joined tens of thousands who have protested across the country in the wake of the grand jury rulings against indictment of the police officers involved in these cases. Moments

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