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The End of Nice
“Mouse bite, one year ago” read the Chief Complaint entry on the chart I picked up from the “nonurgent” pile.
I was a second-year medical resident, on an eight-week stint in the Temple University Hospital emergency room. It was 3:50 am, the beginning of the end of the night shift. All hell could still break loose before my shift ended, but for now we were in a lull, and the less serious cases got our attention.
Goodbye From the ICU
Andrew R Carey
I do not know this man. I have never met him. All I know about him are the words typed in his medical chart–and that, before the day is out, he will die.
I have never heard him speak. I probably couldn’t pick him out in a crowd. Today he looks like a water bed: yellow, warm and squishy.
I wonder if he ever pondered what his last days might be like. Surely he hadn’t thought that at age forty-five he’d succumb to the final stages of hepatitis C, a disease he probably never knew he had. He’s been in this Boston ICU for forty days,
Awakening
Benjamin Ostro with Boris D Veysman
Back when I was a premedical student, I didn’t devote much time to community service. I cared about helping others, and yet, feeling as driven as I did to excel in my academic and extracurricular commitments, I had little time for volunteering.Â
It’s been my sense that most physicians don’t do much community service. If you ask a doctor why this is so, he or she might shrug and say something like “My work benefits the community” or “I’m already overworked.”Â
Upon entering medical school, I absorbed this attitude more or less unconsciously. I viewed volunteer work as “rewarding,” but devoid of any
Mom Journeys to the Other Side
William Bryan
Mom was not fully conscious when she crossed over, but I’m quite certain she was aware of both sides of the veil as she departed the realm of the living. This is a brief story of her dying.Â
After my dad died, more than twenty years ago, my mom moved from our family home to live with my brother, Jim, and his wife, Barb.Â
In retrospect, it was an act of supreme foresight, ensuring that she’d be able to stay in a family setting even if she became unable to care for herself at some point. She enjoyed many quality years with her four grandchildren and traveled with her family to Greece, Maui and Croatia, among other exotic places.Â
Mom’s travels came to
Hospital Corners
Eileen Valinoti
“And now, as we finish up, we’ll need to put our blankets away. I want you to fold them like this,” announced my yoga teacher–a bit sternly, I thought. With swift, deft hands, she began to demonstrate. Something in the tone of her voice and the sharp jut of her chin brought me back to Miss Coyle…
Miss Mary Coyle RN was the nursing arts instructor in my first year of training, more than fifty years ago. She taught our group of thirty–twenty-seven eager eighteen-year-old women and three young nuns–the basic nursing skills: how to give a bed bath; administer an injection; prepare hot and cold compresses, etc.Â
Twice a week, my classmates and I filed into her classroom, which was set up
Are You a Doctor?
Margaret Kim Peterson
“Are you a doctor?”Â
I am sitting by my husband’s hospital bed in the surgical admission ward, where he is being prepped for surgery to close a severe pressure ulcer on his left ischium, the knob on the pelvis where your weight rests when you sit.Â
Dwight was eighteen when an illness damaged his spinal cord, rendering him a paraplegic. He is 49 now, and developing the kinds of problems that go along with being a middle-aged cripple (his self-descriptor of choice).Â
One such problem is pressure ulcers. We thought we’d learned how to manage these, but met our match in this one, which has refused
Conundrum
Matthew Hirschtritt
Walking from an exam room to the nurse’s station in the small outpatient clinic where I worked as a second-year medical student, I paused by a window to gaze out at the winter sunset. After a moment, I looked down to scan the notebook where I kept my schedule and notes for my last patient of the day.
4:15, Ms. Smith, 26, lump on groin–the bare bones of a story waiting to be filled in.
Feeling tired and looking forward to dinner, I sighed dramatically, dropped into a chair in front of a computer console and called up Ms. Smith’s electronic health record.Â
Like most medical records,
Mementos and Memories
Paul Rousseau
Delores sits tilted to the right in a worn wheelchair, a curtain separating her from a sleeping roommate.Â
She is wearing a blue blouse stained with something orange, perhaps Jell-O, and white pants and white socks. A worn gold wedding band adorns the fourth finger of her left hand. Her hair is a shiny gray, perfectly coiffed, and her face is etched with deep wrinkles, a testament to eighty-nine years of life.Â
A tiny bedside shelf displays two faded black-and-white photos from the 1930s or ’40s: one is of Delores in her twenties, a demure smile on her face; the other shows Delores with a young man
On the Bottom Rung
I was in my third year of medical school, and the initial week of my first-ever hospital clerkship had passed without incident. I showed up on time, did what I was told, stepped on no toes and followed my patients as well as I could.
At the close of that week, however, my intern pulled me aside to ask, “Remember learning how to put an IV in a mannequin during the workshop earlier today? Well, there’s a patient in radiology, waiting for a CT scan. The tech can’t flush the IV, and I need you to do it. If you can’t, put in a new one.”
Tech? Flush? I meditated on my intern’s words and realized that this would be my first unsupervised procedure.