Page 230 – Pulse

Nothing to Hide

Leave a Comment / Stories / Kevin Dorsey

About thirty years ago, after I’d completed my internal medicine residency and a rheumatology fellowship, my wife and I moved with our three-year-old son to my wife’s hometown.

There I joined a multispecialty group practice as the second rheumatologist. Over time, the plan was for me to build a rheumatology practice, but while that was happening I took on all kinds of patients, both primary-care and intensive-care. I felt very comfortable doing general internal medicine, and I also liked the intensity of ICU work.

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Hurricane Sandy: Two Tales of One City: Part 2

Hurricane Sandy: Two Tales of One City

for the Ten Days

Leave a Comment / Poems / Madeleine Mysko

Madeleine Mysko

We say goodbye, her hand goes up (but not
in time to catch me), then the breach: I kiss
my mother on the cheek. Oops, I say,
you’d better wash your face. We laugh, of course–
that’s the better way to make it through
the chemotherapeutic calendar.
But it’s no joke. Her white cell count is low.
I see my mother back away from me.

I’m treacherous. I’ve not observed the Ten
Solemn Days of Abstinence. Oh what
to do but put a finger to the lips,
and teach the mouth never to kiss, never
to take a breath, or utter Mother, while
stepping lightly past your door, O Death.

About the poet:

Madeleine Mysko is a registered nurse and a graduate of The Writing Seminars of the Johns Hopkins University. She serves as coordinator of the “Reflections” column for The American Journal of Nursing. Her novel Bringing Vincent Home is based on her experiences as an Army nurse stateside during the Vietnam War. Her poetry and fiction appear widely in literary journals, and her nonfiction has appeared in The Baltimore Sun and The American Journal of Nursing.

About the poem:

“In the octave of this unrhymed Petrarchan sonnet, I confess

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No Red Lights

Leave a Comment / Stories / Loreen Herwaldt

Loreen Herwaldt

As far back as I can remember, I’ve deliberately spent my life on the high road. I was the seventh-grader who was told by adults that she was very serious. I was the college student who majored in chemistry because it was the strongest premed major. I became a doctor.

Before becoming a doctor, I imagined that I would be the epitome of compassion. I envisioned pausing for a moment before I saw each patient to pray for that person and to ask for wisdom. During my last two years of medical school, I enjoyed hanging out with my patients, just listening to their stories. I was the one who made a special trip to buy a book that I thought might encourage a patient. I was the one who sat by a women wrapped in the pain of metastatic malignant melanoma as she moaned, “They shoot sick dogs, don’t they? Why can’t they do that for sick people too?”

During the first month of my internship at St. Louis’s Barnes Hospital, when I was on call every other night in

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Five Years Later

Leave a Comment / Stories / Steven Lewis

Steve Lewis

Evenings in the Sloan-Kettering ICU were starkly lit–nowhere to hide from the glare, bloodshot eyes trained on blinking lights, buzzing machines, masked men and women passing soundlessly through sliding glass doors, and little but hours and hours of bright, eerie luminosity ahead.

By contrast, the days then were dark. No comfort to be found in the sunrise or in that old salve about everything looking better in the morning. My wife and kids and I sat on the edge of uncomfortable couches in dimly lit waiting rooms where the waiting was always either too long or never long enough; we stood shoulder to shoulder in airless elevators with strangers sharing the same muted despair; we sat huddled in the cafeteria and did not eat.

When I was alone I paced the circular halls of that cancer-riddled sixteen-story building, cloaked in green gowns and latex gloves. My beard was always wet with acidic breath behind the paper mask. I slathered my hands in Purell every time I made a move, because it seemed as if germs were the only thing left in my life I could control. Because practically everything I’d once assumed to be true was now a

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For Dr. WCW

Leave a Comment / Poems / Randall Weingarten

Randall Weingarten

Williams brought over a bag of plums,
A tree of white blossoms,
A locomotive
And images of
Her threadbare ankles

I’ve loved his poems
The pages are all
Dog-eared now,
Tear-stained
Or smiling

I know this woman
Sitting at the window
The child on her lap
The tears on her face

And that old woman
With her bag of plums
So sweet, so tasty

I know that attic of despair
The hooks of her gown
Undone,
The whisper of
Silk and cotton
Falling to the floor
Her veined body emerging
From the tangles

How I have labored
With him
On those dark nights
In Paterson
The women crying out
For dear life
And the men
Tweedling in their outer rooms

How I have cherished
Those white chickens
And the words flung in
The wheel tracks
On his way home

About the poet:

Randall Weingarten went to Dartmouth College and Tufts Medical School and did his psychiatry residency at Stanford University. “My life has revolved around clinical practice and medical education. I have been a longtime practitioner ofchanoyu, the Japanese ceremony for offering

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Emergency Landing

Father and Sons

Leave a Comment / Stories / Kathleen Crowley

Kathleen Crowley

It was early November–the sky a sharp, deep blue that only comes at that time of year–and my primary-care clinic in the heart of the city was booked full with bronchitis and early flu. The TV in the corner was tuned to CNN. Children bounced around in boredom, chatting away in an assortment of languages–Haitian and Portuguese creole, Spanish, English.

My last patient of the morning was Jack, a man I’d been seeing for the past few years. He was a middle-aged guy–almost the same age as I was, in fact. I found him sitting quietly in the examining room, reading glasses on and newspaper in hand, wearing a jacket with his employer’s logo on the front.

Unlike most of the people in the waiting room, Jack was feeling well. He was only here to follow up on the usual suspects–diabetes, hypertension, cholesterol, weight struggles. When I checked his blood pressure, though, it was way out of control.

“That’s strange,” I said, looking through his records. “Your pressure is usually pretty good. Have you missed your medications at all in the last few days?”

“No. I take them every day. Might just be”–he took his glasses off and

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Fleeing Alzheimer’s

Telling Nick

Leave a Comment / Stories / Marianne Lonsdale

Marianne Lonsdale

“What’s going to happen to Catie when she grows up?”

I was driving with my son, Nick, to the store when he asked this about his fifteen-year-old cousin, Catie. Nick, age eight, had just spent his spring break at Catie’s home. Blind, she was now losing her ability to talk, but she always recognized Nick’s voice. She adored having him by her side; whenever Nick walked into the room, her face lit up, and she raised her arms for hugs. She was the closest Nick was going to get to having a sibling.

“Will she get a job?” he piped up from the backseat. “Or will someone still have to take care of her?”

Small for his age, Nick was just about big enough to stop using a booster seat, but still young enough to be afraid that monsters in the closet were real.

I’d been wrestling with when to tell him more about Catie. Now, here came this question from out of the blue.

“Her mom and dad will always take care of her,” I said. My first instinct was to

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