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Emergency Landing
Shumon Dhar
In the summer of my first year of college, I did an internship as a nursing attendant in a rehab hospital’s stroke unit.
As a premed student, I had little idea of what it meant to be a physician. But that didn’t stop me from feeling slightly superior to others who weren’t on the same path. Although I didn’t know how to take someone’s blood pressure, I often treated friends to detailed descriptions of the biochemistry of complex metabolic diseases.
My summer job took me totally out of this academic comfort zone.Â
I found myself washing, dressing and caring for the most debilitated people imaginable–unable to walk
Father and Sons
Kathleen Crowley
It was early November–the sky a sharp, deep blue that only comes at that time of year–and my primary-care clinic in the heart of the city was booked full with bronchitis and early flu. The TV in the corner was tuned to CNN. Children bounced around in boredom, chatting away in an assortment of languages–Haitian and Portuguese creole, Spanish, English.Â
My last patient of the morning was Jack, a man I’d been seeing for the past few years. He was a middle-aged guy–almost the same age as I was, in fact. I found him sitting quietly in the examining room, reading glasses on and newspaper in hand, wearing a jacket with his employer’s logo on the front.Â
Unlike most of the people in
Telling Nick
Marianne Lonsdale
“What’s going to happen to Catie when she grows up?”
I was driving with my son, Nick, to the store when he asked this about his fifteen-year-old cousin, Catie. Nick, age eight, had just spent his spring break at Catie’s home. Blind, she was now losing her ability to talk, but she always recognized Nick’s voice. She adored having him by her side; whenever Nick walked into the room, her face lit up, and she raised her arms for hugs. She was the closest Nick was going to get to having a sibling.
“Will she get a job?” he piped up from the backseat. “Or will someone
Beyond Reason
Kathy Speas
Visiting the dementia unit of a nursing home is never easy.
First off, you have to find your patient amid the assemblage of people–mostly women–seated in wheelchairs, recliners, wingbacks, sofas and assorted walkers, or wandering around.
Then, you must make yourself known to the person you’ve found. Here’s where the harder questions arise: How can I introduce myself and convey my role–a hospice chaplain–to someone who has outlasted language? Is my state of mind so calm and engaged that my very being will exude peace and generate trust? Am I totally present, or is my mind bouncing back and forth between tomorrow and yesterday? And just what does it mean, as a hospice chaplain, to provide spiritual support to someone at the end
Five Years to a Cure
Ellen Diamond
Recently, while reading a post in an online chat group for people with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), I spotted an intriguing comment. At an important conference, a world-renowned hematologist had referred to a “five-year timeline” for a cure.
This took me back fourteen years, to when I’d just been diagnosed with CLL. There was a Gilda’s Club near my workplace; I’d always passed it quickly on my way home. Now I found myself stepping through the doorway to hear a top specialist talk about my disease.
I recall his closing words: “Give me five years, and I’ll give you a cure.”Â
As desperately as I wanted to
Remembering John
Hilton Koppe
I remember you the day we met. It was five years ago. I was terrified. You seemed relaxed and at peace. I’d been invited to join the Lennox Head Club, in the town where I live and work; this over-thirty-five match was the first game of soccer I’d played in twenty-five years. I was the oldest on the team. You were the youngest. For you it was just the start of another season, your loping, languid style belying your skill and your speed.
I remember you sitting next to me in my car on the long drive home from a game at Nimbin. You telling me about
House Call
Kendra Peterson
I approached my father in the yard of his most recent home, a small, run-down duplex shack. His hair was whiter than I remembered, his old blue sweater shaggy. He was clipping the hedge in his careless but enthusiastic way; when finished, it wouldn’t look good, but it would look clipped.Â
One of his eyes was red and tearing up. A splinter had flown into it as he trimmed the boughs above his head. He hugged me nervously, and we went inside.Â
He pushed a stack of newspapers off the sofa, and we sat down and awkwardly tried to talk. The cramped living room was dirty, and
An Orphan’s Tale
Peter Ferrarone
At the outset, I confess that I have no experience in the medical field. I’m not a doctor or a nurse; I’m a recent college graduate, a writer and someone who’s interested in the world. And, all last summer, I was a volunteer in Uganda.Â
I’d met a Ugandan priest who was visiting the States on a lecture tour. He described his work overseeing an orphanage located in Western Uganda, a day’s bus ride from Rwanda and Kenya. When he invited me to go and help out there, I accepted.
Upon arriving, I discovered that the orphanage was a small, broken-down concrete house perched on a hill
Cadaver Happy Face
Rachel Willis
Sitting with my mother in a white-walled exam room, awaiting the surgeon’s arrival, I felt happy.Â
Earlier this spring, I’d landed hard on one leg during a volleyball game and collapsed, hearing my knee make a terrible cracking sound, like all ten knuckles firing off. When I resumed playing, after several weeks of rehab, it happened again.Â
Now we were awaiting the MRI results.
You’d think I’d be nervous. I was seventeen, college-bound on a full-ride volleyball scholarship. Would this injury jeopardize that? But I felt glad–and touched with a kind of glamour. During hundreds of boring or grueling practices, I’d longed to sprain an ankle or