Page 245 – Pulse

To My Left

Leave a Comment / Stories / Anne Herbert

Anne Herbert

I walk down the airplane aisle, scanning the rows. My eyes finally fall on 15F. My seat.

My nightmare.

This window seat means only one thing to me: someone to my left. A man, to be exact–middle-aged, reading the New York Times and snacking on a bag of peanuts. He doesn’t notice as I shove my purse under the seat and sit down. My only thoughts are of blending in–with the other passengers, with the chair, with the plane itself. Anything.

My objective on this five-hour flight is simple and clear. It’s the same one that I cling to almost every second of every day: to keep my left side hidden from the world.

Everyone has a good side–a more photogenic side, a certain way that they turn when taking pictures. I don’t have a good side, but rather a “less bad” side–a side whose mere completeness is what appeals to me.

My left side charts the history of my birth defect. My severe underbite is an orthodontic byproduct of my cleft lip and palate. The scar under my nose records the surgery that closed my cleft lip. The scar on my hip commemorates a bone-marrow transfer from hip to » Continue Reading.

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Piece of Work

Leave a Comment / Stories / Jennifer Frank

Jennifer Frank

“You’re a real piece of work!” he spat at me. He was a patient named Martin; I was the supervising physician, trying to role-model for a second-year resident how to conduct a difficult conversation with patients like this.

So far, not so good.

At first glance, Martin seemed an ordinary-looking older man, with close-cut gray hair and plain-framed eyeglasses. But I was struck by his scowl–he was expecting an argument, perhaps because during his interview with the resident he’d already encountered some pushback.

He’d brought a long list of laboratory tests that his biofeedback “doctor” had instructed him to get, saying that his fatigue and other symptoms were caused by “adrenal dysfunction.”

I scanned the list–thyroid, blood count, chemistries, vitamins, adrenal function. “Testing for vitamins,” I thought. “Are they kidding?” Normally, we test for only a small handful of vitamins; would our lab even know how to test for the others?

Outwardly, I tried to look neutral. “If I order a lot of tests, it’s statistically very likely that one will come back abnormal,” I said. “That may not indicate a real problem; it could only mean that you’ll end up having more tests.”

“I want all of

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Failure to Thrive

Counting Cards

Leave a Comment / Stories / Alexandra Godfrey

Alexandra Godfrey

Once again, I see a still heart. As I stare at the fetal monitor, I search for signs of life. The screen flickers; my son’s heart does not.

The last time I saw him, he looked happy–content in his life-bubble. As he turned somersaults, he waved at me. I had thought he was saying hello, but I realize now that he was waving goodbye.

Soon I must deliver his still form into the world. My labor will be difficult–his cries exchanged for my tears; his body, small and membranous, fitting into my one hand.

This is not what I had envisioned. I had dreamt of my son’s vitality, not his mortality. I contemplate the suffering–is there no way to tally up the trauma?

For the third time, I am faced with the loss of a child, and experience is not making it any easier.

When my first child was born, he too had a still heart. As he was rushed away, I was asked to give him a name. I called him Ben.

Life almost evaded him. Ben was born with a complex congenital heart defect that affects one baby in ten thousand. Without emergency cardiac surgery, the

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Each Day, Same Story

Leave a Comment / Stories / Jennifer Reckrey

Jennifer Reckrey

Editor’s Note: Jennifer Reckrey is a family medicine resident in New York City. Each week, while she was an intern, she recorded some of her experiences as a brand-new doctor.

I have been his primary doctor for the entire three weeks he has been on the hospital floor. Sometimes he drives me crazy. Once or twice I’ve asked my senior resident to take over for a bit so I can hide out, catch my breath and try to get some of my other work done. Yet despite his daily demands and my hours of exasperation, I have never felt this connected to a patient before.

Over these weeks, I have watched his health slowly but steadily deteriorate. He first came to the hospital because his home oxygen wasn’t helping as much as usual when he got short of breath while walking. A week later he needed his oxygen whenever he felt anxious. Now he’s short of breath all the time. Without a face mask constantly pumping pure oxygen, his skin turns ashy purple and he slowly becomes agitated, then delirious.

When I got to work this Sunday morning, the night team told me that overnight he had refused

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Does the Buddha Play Pool?

Leave a Comment / Poems / Lenora Lapidus

Come Medicine Buddha

Come shine your rays upon me
Penetrate deep within my body
To quell my queasy stomach
And soothe my aching bones.

Let those golden arrows
Shoot deep within my frame
Extinguishing the round tumors
That live inside of me.

Like a pool cue poised and ready
Aim straight for the triangle
Number 6 in right side pocket
Red 4 to far left corner.

Knocking away each colored ball
Dropping steadily into the pockets
Clearing away the hard assortment
Until only white and black remain.

The 8 ball holding fast
White blood cell gearing up.

And, then, a final shot–and POP!
No more colored balls
The table’s cleared.

About the poet:

Lenora Lapidus is an attorney and the director of the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. She litigates and engages in advocacy in courts throughout the United States and in international human-rights forums. Her work addresses economic justice, violence against women, educational equity and women and girls in the criminal and juvenile justice systems. She has written and read poetry for many years. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her husband and daughter.

About the poem:

This poem was written shortly after I was

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Breaking Bad News

Coming Full Circle

Leave a Comment / Stories / Stacy Nigliazzo

Stacy Nigliazzo

Only thirty minutes into my evening ER nursing shift, and I was already behind. My first patient was a pregnant teenager with heavy vaginal bleeding. “About three months, I guess,” she flatly replied when asked about her last period. As we placed her legs in the stirrups for the pelvic exam, torrents of blood and water rolled into the kick bucket on the floor.

Dr. Parkman had barely opened the speculum when we saw it. I knew she couldn’t see the doctor’s face, but she could see mine. Shielding her from my expression, stunned and speechless, I cowered as best I could behind her left knee.

There it was. Tiny, pink and perfect. Her baby’s hand, so small that it would easily fit inside the shell of a walnut–outstretched as if reaching for us, for its very life.

The doctor and I both instantly knew there was no chance of survival. It just wasn’t time yet. He removed the speculum, and we watched as the tiny fingers slowly disappeared back inside.

Fifteen minutes later I exited the labor and delivery floor with an empty stretcher, having left my patient in a stark delivery room, pushing. The screeching fetal

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Mistaken Identity

Leave a Comment / Poems / Kathleen Grieger

Surgery finished,

I finally sleep

Pushing my shoulders,
the technician wakes me

“Come now, we need
a chest x-ray”

Smiling, she pulls me
into position

The x-ray machine
tight against me

Finally getting a chance,
I ask what she is doing

“Oh,” she says “I have
the wrong one

You are not a 64
year old male”

Lying me down,
she walks away

As I fall back to sleep,
I wonder, now bald

what I must
look like

About the poet:

Kathleen Grieger has published poetry in many venues, including Free Verse, Caduceus, Blood and Thunder: Musings on the Art of Medicine, The Healing Muse and online in Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine and Breath and Shadow. She has written hundreds of poems about her brain surgeries as well as her interactions with physicians and other healthcare professionals. Her poems are currently used at Froedtert Hospital in Milwaukee to teach that patients are people first.

About the poem:

“Frustrated with the problems and errors that were hugely complicating my medical treatment after brain surgery, I realized that it was necessary for me to start writing again. Because I’d been so busy before, my poetry had been set aside; picking it up again was the best thing

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Brain Cutting

Leave a Comment / Stories / Emma Samelson-Jones

Emma Samelson-Jones

The page came to my resident, who grinned and looked over at me, his hovering medical student. “You should go to this.”

I looked down at the pager.

“Brain Cutting. 2:30 PM. Room B157.”

Text pagers are the indifferent bearers of all news. Emergencies–“Smith, BP 60/30, Room L721”–appear in the same font as messages seemingly borrowed from a teenager’s cell phone: “OMG, the harpist in the hospital lobby is playing ‘My heart will go on’ from Titanic. WTF?”

I dutifully took the elevator down to the hospital basement and opened the door to the morgue. The medical examiner and a group of neurology residents and students were gathered around a steel table, its sides sloping gently down to a central drain.

As more people arrived, the residents repeated the patient’s history. Adrenoleukodystrophy–a rare genetic defect, marked by progressive brain damage. Same disease as in that movie Lorenzo’s Oil. A freak traffic accident involving a train had been followed by worsening weakness. Unsteady gait. Seizures. Personality changes. Death.

Most of the residents had cared for this patient over the previous year. We flipped through a pathology book with autopsy photos of another adrenoleukodystrophy case, then reviewed the brain MRIs that

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Heart to Heart

Leave a Comment / Stories / Janani Krishnaswami

Janani Krishnaswami

I first met you in pre-op. It was my first week as a third-year medical student; my white coat was still white, the hidden interior pockets empty and the ten gel pens neatly tucked in my front pocket still leak-free. Stationed on a surgery rotation, I had officially spent twelve hours in the operating room–a frantic, exhausting blur of standing on tiptoe, gripping surgical retractors and struggling to avoid contaminating the sterile operating field where the surgeons neatly clipped and cut. You were the next case. From your chart I knew the barest facts: your name was Marie; you were forty-five years old, diagnosed with invasive breast cancer and scheduled for surgical removal of both cancer-ridden breasts

As I made my way to meet you, my supervising resident tapped me on the shoulder. “Just to let you know,” he said, “you probably won’t get much of a history. She only speaks French.”

Somewhere among my overworked brain cells lurked a few years’ worth of grade-school French, so I shook your hand and launched into what I hoped was a confident introduction. “Bonjour, Marie! Je suis étudiant en medicine.” Your eyes lit up, perhaps in recognition of a familiar

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Cure

1 Comment / Poems / Veneta Masson

Veneta Masson

In Latin it means care,
conjures priests and temples
the laying on of hands
sacred pilgrimage
sacrifice
the sickbed
invalid and
solemn attendants.

How far we have come.
Today’s English
has neatly expunged
these purely human elements.
Cure is impersonal, consequential
unequivocal, sometimes violent–
the annihilation
of the thing that ails.

This nurse
approaching the patient
has discarded temple garb
for practical scrubs.
His gloved hands
unsheathe the magic bullet,
shoot it through the central line
where it locks onto the target cells.

For the not-yet-cured,
there is still sacred pilgrimage–
that dogged slog
to the high tech shrine,
the health food store,
the finish line of the annual race
where, etched on each undaunted face,
is a gritty tale of survival.

About the poet:

Veneta Masson RN is a nurse and poet living in Washington, DC. She has written three books of essays and poems, drawing on her experiences over twenty years as a family nurse practitioner and director of an inner-city clinic. Information about her poetry collection Clinician’s Guide to the Soul is available at sagefemmepress.com.

About the poem:

“What started me on the path toward this poem was my ambivalence about symbolic ribbons of all colors, the

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fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

To My Left

Piece of Work

Failure to Thrive

Counting Cards

Each Day, Same Story

Does the Buddha Play Pool?

Breaking Bad News

Coming Full Circle

Mistaken Identity

Brain Cutting

Heart to Heart

Cure

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fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

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