Page 240 – Pulse

Adam

Leave a Comment / Stories / Genevieve Yates

Genevieve Yates

I tried to focus on the chart in front of me, but it may as well have been written in Russian. I’d been awake for thirty-two hours, and my brain, thick with fatigue, refused to cooperate. I knew I shouldn’t be working, but I was too proud, too stubborn, too something to admit that I wasn’t coping.

On the first day of my neurosurgical rotation, the resident I was replacing had told me, “Ten-to-fourteen-hour days, twelve days on, two days off. Say goodbye to your life for the next three months!”

I was prepared for the long hours, endless paperwork and ward-round humiliations. I expected that it might be necessary to take a leave of absence from my personal life. What I didn’t expect was that my personal and working lives would collide headlong.

As I sat there, not writing up ward-round notes, my boyfriend, Adam, lay across the hall in the neurosurgical ICU. Twenty-four hours earlier, he’d had a tumor removed from the back of his brain.

We’d met in the med school library when I was a final-year medical student: Waiting in line for the photocopier, we’d struck up a conversation. Adam had just been diagnosed with testicular

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Toothache

Going Blind

Deja-vu

Leave a Comment / Stories / Justin Sanders

It looked like the skin of an orange–peau d’orange, in medspeak. My fellow interns and I had heard about it in medical school; some had even seen it before. As our attending physician undraped Mrs. Durante’s breast one sunny morning during our first month as interns, we knew that what we were seeing was bad.

Mrs. Durante wore a hospital gown and a brightly colored head scarf. She looked like a child lying in the bed: small, delicate, demure. Her face was pretty, her voice soft and deep. By contrast, the mass rounding out the side of her right breast bulged aggressively. It was firm to the touch, reddish against her olive skin. When asked, she said it hurt.

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Affected

Leave a Comment / Stories / Jessica Tekla Les

Jessica Tekla Les

During my third year of medical school I was performing a routine breast exam, more for practice than anything else. I was trying the concentric-circles-around-the-nipple technique, one of several I’d been taught. About halfway through the right breast I found a lima-bean-sized lump, not far from the breastbone. I took liberties with this particular exam. I poked the lump, tried to move the lump, squished down on the lump.

I took such liberties because it was my own breast.

At the time, I responded clinically. I thought to myself, I am twenty-seven years old, with no family history and no risk factors. Nothing to worry about. I knew the likely diagnosis, a fibroadenoma or localized fibrocystic change, both common in my age group. I double-checked a textbook to be sure, then dismissed the lump from my mind.

A month later, shortly after my twenty-eighth birthday, my primary care doctor stumbled upon the lump during an annual physical–even though I hadn’t mentioned it to her. She agreed that the lump was tender and freely mobile, the opposite of what a cancer should feel like, but she ordered an ultrasound, just to be safe.

I thought, Really?

Then fear crept in.

Five

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Life, Preciously Poured

Falling in Love With My Doctor

Leave a Comment / Stories / Judith Lieberman

Judith Lieberman

The other doctors I consulted called him brilliant. His past patients praised his compassion. He actually responded to e-mails. And, lastly, he was known as the best-looking doctor at the cancer center. What more could I ask?

On the other hand, what choice did I have? After twelve years, I was facing a recurrence of a relatively rare oral cancer, located inconveniently at the base of my tongue. The treatment options were not great. The radical surgery recommended by one prominent cancer center could have left me unable to swallow, talk or eat normally.

My incredible husband stayed up many nights researching surgery, radiation, chemotherapy and all the combinations. On the bright side, my teenagers cleaned their rooms without being asked!

The last straw came when, while talking on my cell phone to yet another cancer center and making the turn into a parking lot, I crashed my car. Just one more broken item needing to be fixed.

* * * * *

I prepare for eight weeks of combined chemotherapy and radiation, which my new doctor candidly describes as “setting off a bomb in your mouth.” Sitting in the exam room, I know that my husband

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Broken

Leave a Comment / Stories / Jordan Grumet

Jordan Grumet

I was a third-year medical student in the first week of my obstetrics rotation. The obstetrics program was known to be high-pressure, its residents among the best. Mostly women, they were a hard-core group–smart, efficient, motivated–and they scared the heck out of us medical students.

I remember the day clearly: Not only was I on call, but I was assigned to the chief resident’s team. I felt petrified.

We’d started morning rounds as usual, running down the list of patients in labor. Five minutes in, my chief got a “911” page from the ER, located in the next building. This seldom happened, so instead of calling back, we ran downstairs and over to the trauma bay.

We walked into pure chaos. The patient was 27, in her last weeks of pregnancy and actively exsanguinating–bleeding to death. She and her husband had been fighting; apparently he’d picked up a kitchen knife and stabbed her in the neck.

As the ER physician and the trauma surgeon worked rapidly on the woman’s neck, my chief readied herself to deliver the baby. She turned to me.

“Quick, get me a sterile gown and a scalpel.”

Helping her to gown and glove, I

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