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Marcia Must Exist
Marcia doesn’t know how to ride her bike very steadily. She is afraid of swimming in the ocean and has been known to proudly announce that she’s “not a math person.” But rest assured, she has positive qualities as well.
Her friends describe her as one of the sweetest people they know, and she loves to cook. She’s not the world’s most amazing chef, true, but people coming into her kitchen while she cooks? No problem! She tells them how they can help, with not a hint of impatience. She also fancies herself quite intelligent; when she was growing up, her superior IQ was an item of family lore. (Her parents had it measured when she was five, after quizzing her with flashcards for six
Good Job!
Robert holds back tears as we sit at the bedside of his wife, Shauna, who is dying of congestive heart failure. I’m a hospice social worker, and we’ve been talking about Robert’s fear of being left alone to raise their two young daughters.
“She’s the one who knows how to be a good parent,” he says. “I’ve always just followed her lead. I’ll be lost when she dies.”
I nod, acknowledging his pain and fear. “What would she say to you about that, Robert?”
A Patient’s Gift
“Thank you for these past couple of days.”
A simple sentence, yet one that forever changed my perspective on end-of-life care.
A faint beeping noise echoed in my room as my eyes slowly opened; it was 5:00 AM. I glanced out my window. The sun had yet to rise, but the darkness and silence were comforting in their own way. After breakfast, I got ready and headed out to the hospital where I was doing my residency training in family medicine.
The crisp morning air woke me up, and the drive to the hospital was no different from usual. Little did I know that the rest of the day would show me what it truly means to be a physician.
Recovering From Moral Injury
The nurse’s murmur was gentle: “Dr. Bui, Ms. Sanchez is still waiting for her Pap test.”
More than an hour earlier, I’d left Ms. Sanchez waiting in an exam room while I rushed to see the rest of the patients on my schedule. And then I’d forgotten about her.
I’d had the inevitable difficult moments in my early career as a family doctor, but this marked a new low.
A Final Concert in the PICU
I learned of Alex’s death from an attending physician in UCLA’s division of pediatric hematology-oncology, where I was a second-year resident. We were in the middle of rounds, and upon hearing the news, our team grew somber.
“Alex passed peacefully, surrounded by her family and friends,” the attending told us. “Her family wants to thank the medical team for their care and support.”
Alex had been transferred to our pediatric intensive-care unit (PICU) for acute respiratory failure; she needed sedation, a breathing tube and blood-pressure support.
She was only twenty years old, an undergraduate at an East Coast university.
Medicine Without a Bottle
Editor’s Note: May is National Nurses Month.
When is hope medicine?
In the middle of the night, a woman’s feet quietly whisked across the hospital floor to my bed.
I was seventeen, grieving the death of my mother by suicide, and the loss of our family unit. I was the oldest, doing my best to keep everything and everyone together. My stepfather was absent, spending most of his time drinking at Lex’s Lounge. My younger siblings alternated between staying at home or with our grandparents. By all accounts, it was a confusing chapter in our lives.
Missing
I sit on the cold chair, looking at the floor.
“Yes, I know I’m depressed,” I say, then pause.
“It’s just that my mum went missing seven years ago, and she was never found.”
Another pause, my words falling away, my eyes lowering.
“Since then, I’ve never been the same,” I say. “It’s hard; it still is.”
My Demography of Grief
Sometimes life hands me stories I never could have imagined—yet, once they occur, I realize that I should have expected them all along. This story from my life in an old folks’ home is one such instance.
A little over two years ago, my family placed me in an assisted-living facility for elderly people. (Under my breath, I call it “insisted” living.)
When Dads Fail
My youngest son Camron, was only ten years old—and he was feeling bereft, because he’d lost all connection to his friends. His iPad was on the fritz, less than a year after we’d purchased it.
Camron had yet to dive into the electronic age as his classmates had done. Mostly he played outside with his dogs and cats, fed and chased his goats and bounced on the trampoline with his brother. But during the one hour per day when we permitted him to play games online with his friends, he grinned from ear to ear and laughed nonstop.
Now his iPad had quit working.