Page 242 – Pulse

Confessions of a 75-Year-Old Drug Addict

Arlene Silverman

The physician, a slim, young man with a shaved head and intense, dark eyes, reaches out to shake hands. I fumble to extend one hand while the other clutches a questionnaire that I haven’t finished filling out.

“That’s okay,” Dr. Gordon says. “You can finish later.”

He can tell that I’m nervous, but seems to understand. He knows that I’ve had to sign in at a window surrounded by other patients, many younger than my own children. Some of them look dazed; others have dozed off. Still others, alert, look as if they’d just come from their job at the bank.

Me? I walk with a cane. My clothes have been carefully chosen to look presentable. I’ve come through a door labeled “Chemical Dependency Clinic” in small, discreet letters. If you hadn’t been looking for the sign, you’d have missed it. The building has no street-level windows and is in a neighborhood that could kindly be called “transitional,” rundown at its core but reluctantly yielding to gentrification.

I am seventy-five years old, and I have come to Dr. Gordon because I’ve become addicted to drugs.

While he scrolls through my

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May I Have Your Attention, Please?

Leave a Comment / Stories / Adam Phillip Stern

Adam Phillip Stern

Some sentences should never be interrupted.

“We have the results of your HIV test,” the attending physician had begun. But fate interrupted with a seemingly endless loudspeaker announcement:

“May I have your attention, please? Would the following patients please report to the nurse’s station for morning medications….”

Nothing about Benjamin’s story was ordinary. He had been voluntarily admitted to an inpatient psychiatry unit after reporting many symptoms of depression–extreme somnolence, fatigue, thirty-pound weight loss with poor appetite, diffuse pain, decreased energy and joylessness for about three months.

Benjamin was charming, smart and eager to follow medical advice. As a relatively inexperienced medical student, I found interviewing him a refreshing change of pace from my difficult interactions with the poorly groomed individuals who paced the halls repeating nonsensical phrases and questions over and over again. Benjamin always peppered our talks with comments about current events and informed questions about his care. He could often be seen reading the newspaper or interacting with other patients or staff in a way that made me wonder whether he really belonged there.

Benjamin’s life story was as engaging as his demeanor. He had worked

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Reflections From a Senior Citizen

Leave a Comment / Poems / Dorothy Kligerman

I used to talk of fun and games

Now I talk of aches and pains.
I used to paint the town bright red
Now at nine I am in bed.

I used to dream of lovers bold.
Now if truth be told
The only men who interest me
Are those with a medical degree.

“Why,” you ask, “have they such clout?”
Well–we have so much to talk about:
There’s my arthritis and stenosis,
Hypertension, scoliosis.

In a cozy room, alone, we chat.
We never have a lover’s spat.
So keep your handsome Romeos
I’ll always take those medicos!

About the poet:

I am ninety-five years old, widowed, with three married children, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. My first published work appeared in February, 1931, in The Record Book of my graduating class of Simon Gratz High School in Philadelphia. It was not until the 1980s that my work appeared in print again. I was a reporter for the Mt. Airy Express, writing on assignment twice monthly and actually being paid! The paper folded at the end of that decade. Again there was a hiatus,

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Pulse Readers’ Hopes and Wishes for the New Year

Pulse Takes the Day Off–and Reflects Upon a Historic Christmas

Babies

Leave a Comment / Poems / Elizabeth Szewczyk

She tells me she wants to have a baby,

my daughter who was my baby
so many years ago.

Everything comes back to me–
the waiting, the wanting, the whisking
off to baby-earth, that angelic place,
passing through life
with its normal sounds, smells, and sights,
into the realm of women’s starlight, bright
as Polaris, a celestial universe of power,
revolving so far away
that only women with growing
babies under their swollen, milk-gorged breasts
could inhabit this land.

Just for a moment, I want to have a baby again.
My aging body with its downhill breasts
and lost uterus aches to soar to that planet.
I want to feel life inside wiggle its
bowed, floppy legs, delicate arms,
those rubbery appendages not yet knit together.
I want to feel it somersault at
the top ledge of my ribs, understand
that surprising quiet of knowing
something inside me will come…
without him.

Just for a moment I want
every muscle in my baby-battered
body to unite for the same cause,

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An Intern’s Guilt

Leave a Comment / Stories / Anna Kaltsas

Anna Kaltsas

“She’s been here for two months already. She’s very complicated; you’re going to be spending a lot of time with her and her family,” my fellow intern said as she began signing out her patients to me.

It was my first rotation in the medical intensive care unit, and I was terrified. I was in my first few months as a “real” practicing physician–a title that I still felt uncomfortable with. If a nurse called out “Doctor!” I wouldn’t respond, thinking that she couldn’t possibly be referring to me.

My fear mushroomed as my co-intern rattled off the patient’s problem list–bone-marrow transplant, shock liver, congestive heart failure, anemia, coagulopathy, sepsis, acute renal failure, ICU neuropathy, encephalopathy, ventilator-dependent…I knew what these meant, I just felt overwhelmed to see them all in a single patient.

Her name was Laura. Her story was impossibly tragic. A newly married, successful young professional, she’d visited her general practitioner two months back, complaining of weight loss and a headache, only to have blood tests reveal devastating news: leukemia.

Her first inpatient chemotherapy treatments had been followed by a bone-marrow transplant, then by complications from chemotherapy. A barrage of serious infections had

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Mom

Leave a Comment / Stories / Diane Guernsey

Diane Guernsey

By this time next week, my mother may be dead.

In a sense, she’s been dying for a long time. This leg of her journey is the last in a decades-long trek with Parkinson’s disease.

She lies there, her head small and delicate on the pillow. Her hair is a wispy white thatch; her throat muscles are rigid, as if she’s just lifted a huge barbell. But her breaths come slowly, with long pauses in between, as if she’s nearly too tired to go on. Her brown eyes stare up sightlessly, lids half-open.

This nursing facility is part of a stepped-care retirement center where my parents moved more than ten years ago, anticipating the day when my mom would need more help than Dad could give her. They lived in an apartment there for years, while Parkinson’s slowly chilled my mom’s brisk, jaunty gestures and muffled her lively, Texas-inflected conversation into an inaudible murmur. (We all knew that this was inevitable, even though she received the most up-to-date drug regimen.) When a stroke unexpectedly felled my dad seven years ago, my mom, then 80, chose to move into the facility’s nursing wing.

About a

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