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A Doctor’s Dilemma

12 Comments / Stories /

Jessica Zitter

It was my first day at my new job, practicing a new specialty. Having spent fourteen years as an ICU physician–including a four-year pulmonary/critical-care fellowship in this very hospital–I had just completed a palliative-care fellowship. Now I was the hospital’s palliative-care consult attending.

When I set eyes on the patient in room 1407, my first thought was: THIS LADY NEEDS TO BE INTUBATED–STAT!

The only trouble was that my job was to ease this patient’s passing, not to prolong her life.

The team had told me that Mrs. Zelnick, an eighty-two-year-old widow, was dying from pneumonia and didn’t want to be put on life support.

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The Bodies Green and Blue

2 Comments / Poems /


Krupa Harishankar

Reflections from the anatomy lab
overlooking Central Park

Reluctant, the same green

light over that copse of trees

and sheet of lawn glares and

bends through the lifted-open

cage of ribs, branched veins,

and cragged spine. Exposed,

my hands appear on the gurney

as a child’s. The one across 

needled grass applauds small

palms, not distant, but sound

mutes here. Joy does not carry

heft like limbs of the corpse

before me. In layers of blue

latex, the uniform tint of a pond

rendered from afar–its depth

imprecise–I glove and delve

into the viscera, leaving this

abdomen a cavity. I wonder

what hands have touched you.

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Auditory Hallucinations in Schizophrenia

Auditory Hallucinations in Schizophrenia–8 mm

Leave a Comment / visuals /

 

Eva Catenaccio

About the artist: 

Eva Catenaccio is a medical student at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, NY. “I spent a summer working with a neuropsychiatrist and a radiologist examining functional neuroimaging in schizophrenia. My paintings explore the ways in which images are used to communicate scientific results to both professional and lay audiences; and also how, when taken out of context, these images become open to an array of emotional interpretations. I like to imagine the patients who participated in these research studies examining the work as a reflection of their own experience of illness.”

About the artwork:

“This is a painting of the statistical parametric map generated by the analysis of regional cerebral blood flow as measured by positron-emission tomography during verbal auditory hallucinations in five patients with schizophrenia. The work is inspired by the paper “A functional neuroanatomy of hallucinations in schizophrenia,” by Silbersweig et al (Nature, 1995). During PET scanning, subjects in this study were asked to press a button every time

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Seeing the Light

5 Comments / Stories /


Sarah Houssayni

Many healers, teachers and parents have them.  

At one point, I did, too. I had delusions. I thought I was a hero, a rescuer clad in a shiny white coat and wielding the sword of clinical wisdom. 

 

I look back on those days with nostalgia and regret. I wish they’d lasted a little longer–my belief in my own medical grandeur and invincibility. 

 

My most memorable patient changed that for me.

I remember how her mother, Gigi, first brought Serenity to see me when she was a newborn. Gigi was fifteen; I was annoyed. Too much work for a pediatrician to make sure all the education gets through–after all, she was still a pediatric patient herself. 

 

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Rewriting the Script

15 Comments / Stories /

Adam B. Weiner

Useless….

 

The word came unbidden into my head. 

 

Oh, no. Here I was, only a few questions into Mr. Marlow’s medical history, and the feeling had begun already.

 

I’d often experienced this when I was a pre-med student, spending so much time on labs and textbooks instead of with patients. When I’d begun my first year as a medical student, I’d hoped to leave all that behind. Medical school felt energizing: I was ready to see real patients and start helping them!

 

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Alone - Hourigan

Alone

2 Comments / visuals /

 

Frank Burnside (photo); Terry Hourigan (text)

Editor’s Note: We received this submission last week, as we were still coming to terms with the news of Robin Williams’ suicide. His death and our collective loss gave some urgency to publishing this photo and essay, which touch upon that which we see–and that which is hidden–when we look at one another.

About the artist: 

“Frank Burnside is a photographer and a later-life friend who was downing milk and cookies in nursery school when I was a full-blown adult in first grade,” writes Terry Hourigan. “Through the years he has created a library of nature still lifes. I get to see them often and choose one from time to time, keeping it on file so that it may someday serve to express an inexplicable emotion in a story. The ferns immediately struck me as a metaphor for being close but not truly seen; for being a chameleon–camouflaged from both friend and foe.”

About the artwork:

“How many

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The Well-Fed Physician

7 Comments / Stories /

Randy Rockney

When I was in medical residency, more than thirty years ago, I ran with a pack of fellow residents, all guys who were fit to varying degrees. Once, on an outing, we discussed the–hopefully–hypothetical question: “If the need arose, which one of us would we eat first?”

“Randy!” my friends gleefully concluded.

“His meat would be the most marbled,” one added.

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bless our children - kasman

Bless Our Children

Leave a Comment / visuals /

 

Deborah Kasman

About the artist: 

Deborah Kasman is a family physician and mother of two teens. A practicing clinician and academic bioethicist, she works as a bioethics director for Kaiser Permanente in southern California. “Two-and-a-half years ago, I started painting to reconnect to my own soul, having gone through my own experience of trauma while raising a child with undiagnosed Asperger’s syndrome, who had uncontrollable rages. I paint by a method called Intuitive Painting, whose mantra is ‘the canvas can hold all of your feelings.’ “

About the artwork:

“I was in a painting class when Adam Lanza shot and killed twenty-six people, mostly children, in a Newtown, CT, elementary school. While our country mourned the loss of those individuals, I also mourned for Adam and his mother, whose deaths were tragic as well. My experience with my own family members who had suffered from mental illness gave me insight into Adam’s fear and angst. In ‘Bless Our Children,’ a woman sobs under a weeping willow tree in the

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