Where Mortals Suffer Life
When she came, her legs were cold and her heart weak. The tracings showed flickering beats. She was confused and barely there. She was a ticking time bomb.
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Feeding Tubes – To Place or Not to Place?
Sometimes I have to pinch myself. Is this really my twenty-fifth year of practice as a palliative care physician? My head is full of memories of caring for hundreds of patients as they navigate their final days of life.
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Kindness in the Face of Loss
Editor’s Note: This piece was awarded an honorable mention in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”
I’ve just received a call from a hospital: An urgent appointment at its fetal-medicine unit has been arranged for me for tomorrow.
I try to get all the critical information.
“Which hospital did you say?” I ask. The medical secretary repeats the name, sounding a little surprised. I haven’t heard of this hospital; but then, I haven’t really heard of any, except for our local one.
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Hospice Angels
I would not have survived caring for my parents at the end of their lives without the help of my hospice angels. Ma spent the final 10 days of her life in a palliative care facility; Dad endured the last three months of his life getting at-home hospice care. The individuals from hospice—nurses, occupational and physical therapists, counselors, and aides—not only supported my parents but also gave me the love and care I desperately needed.
September More Voices: Palliative and Hospice Care
Dear readers,
My thoughts and feelings about palliative and hospice care took hold during medical school and residency training.
I was a medical student during the AIDS epidemic of the mid-1980s, when our Bronx hospital admitted a succession of patients infected with HIV, a virus that compromised their immune systems and made them vulnerable to a host of infections.
They came to the emergency room short of breath, feverish, somnolent, unable to see properly, convulsing, soiling themselves with intractable diarrhea…The list of possibilities was long and scary.
These patients, invariably young, were all going to die.
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Letter From the Dead
Gross Anatomy class is a rite of passage, and has been so for a few hundred years. Generations of first-year medical students have spent months dissecting cadavers and painstakingly learning the intricacies of human anatomy.
I well remember my first day of class—the overpowering smell of formaldehyde and the unnerving sight of a roomful of twenty-five dead people lying supine, their faces and genitals covered, on metal tables.
Assigned by the alphabet, four students to a cadaver, my peers and I (Fabert, Ferris, Flamm and Fleming—my maiden name) stood gingerly next to our cadaver, careful not to get too close. We shifted uneasily. Touching our cadaver (a woman) for the first time, even with gloves on, was disquieting.
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Finding the Upside
Editor’s Note: This piece was a finalist in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”
Being different is often viewed as bad. At a young age, I learned that it meant you didn’t belong. I vividly remember watching the Sesame Street puppets dance and sing about an object that “didn’t belong” because it was “not like the others.”
Throughout my school years, I tried hard to fit in. Being overweight, and as uncoordinated as they come, I constantly felt out of place in my body and among my peers. I remember trying so hard to make people laugh, to win them over.
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The Waiting Room
I recently spent some time in the waiting room of a hospital, while my husband was having surgery. As I sat there, I was patting myself on the back for being organized for this little jaunt. I had remembered a wheeled suitcase in which to store hubby’s belongings while he was in the OR, I’d packed some nibbles for myself so I wouldn’t have to go down to the cafeteria if I didn’t want to, and I’d made sure I had my my phone with me.
Then I suddenly realized that what I hadn’t thought to bring was a phone charger, that my phone’s battery was low, and that the doctor was going to call me on it to tell me how the surgery went.
Watching for Survival
While I was driving to work on a sunny Friday morning many years ago, the opening music for the StoryCorps broadcast streamed from the radio. I raised the volume and listened. A daughter asked her father how he’d made it out of a psychiatric hospital where he received shock treatments. He had been committed for insanity at age 22. He replied simply that he watched television to see how “normal” people acted and mimicked what he saw. Eventually, the staff released him.
The interview ended. I lowered the volume on the radio and reflected on this man’s smarts and the deplorable state of inpatient mental health in the 1960s. And then I started bawling.
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Skeptical
I was in the process of leaving my first practice after residency, after three years at a rural community health center in western New York.
Saying goodbye to patients is emotional and takes extra time. Most patients expressed gratitude. Some brought small tangible gifts.