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A Different Kind of Miracle
Anita Fry
Once upon a time, I was a newspaper journalist: I chased down sources and sweated over deadlines. Then, in mid-career, I switched to doing marketing and communications for a regional healthcare system. This consisted of a large hospital and many outpatient clinics, including a community cancer center.
Because I handled communications work for the cancer center, I also had a seat on the Cancer Committee–an oversight group of oncologists, pathologists, nurses and other specialists, who met quarterly.
I found these gatherings a bit intimidating. My fellow members were welcoming, but they spoke almost entirely in acronyms and medical jargon–“OCNs,” “PET/CTs,” “staging,” “linear accelerators.”
One Last Sale
Judith Reichtein
“Did you sell the business yet?”
I marvel at my patient Jack: despite his breathlessness, he’s somehow managed to greet his wife Sara with a complete sentence. Given his condition, it’s truly amazing.Â
Most of his lung function has been devastated by his forty-year, pack-a-day smoking habit; the rest has been demolished by cancer. The easy, automatic breathing he once took for granted is just a memory. He can’t even lie down without feeling like he’s suffocating. Propped up on pillows in his hospital bed, he struggles for every breath–pulling it in, forcing it out–his brow creased in a perpetual frown of concentration.Â
Sara and Jack have been married for thirty-five years, since before he took over his father’s small shoe
Shattered
Kristina X. Duan
It was a Monday morning in Chengdu, the capital city of China’s Sichuan province. I was a premedical student who had traveled here from the U.S. to do a six-week summer term abroad at People’s Hospital, one of Chengdu’s largest cancer centers.
As the child of Chinese-born parents, I’d always felt a special fascination for my parents’ strange, captivating homeland. In college, I seized the first opportunity to pursue medical studies in China alongside native students. I’d found myself immersed in a healthcare system that was fragmented, corrupt and riddled with problems stemming from overpopulation and limited resources.Â
Saving My Appendix
Andrew T. Gray
The doctor was adamant. “This is America, not Sweden,” he told me. “We operate.”Â
How did this happen to me? I wondered, looking at him across the ER exam room. How could I, a healthcare provider, not have insurance?Â
I had woken up that morning with a mildly upset stomach. Nonetheless, I’d gone to my job (begun only six weeks earlier) as a physician assistant at a Beverly Hills HIV clinic. I’d seen patients until lunchtime, then attended a research meeting. The subject was a study of irritable bowel syndrome.Â
“I need to be in this study,” I joked to a coworker. “My IBS is acting up.”Â
I don’t have IBS, but I was indeed having crampy stomach pain. I continued to see patients
A Second Chance
Mitch Kaminski
My patient Maria sits before me, looking vaguely distressed.
She’s returned for a follow-up visit, six weeks after our first. The morning is half over, and I’m clipping along, staying on time, using the new electronic medical record system (EMR) without a glitch and with a sense of satisfaction. Three months back, when I joined this small-town practice as part of my new position as a health-system medical director, I found the EMR challenging, so I’m pleased that I’ve finally mastered it.
Maria’s face looks familiar–pretty, but with a worried look that matches her hastily applied makeup.Â
In Sickness and in Health
Larry Zaroff
Four months after having a knee replacement, I stumbled into the bathroom at three AM, not fully awake, hoping to urinate.
Losing my balance, I fell. The result was a compound fracture of my left leg–the one with the prosthetic knee.Â
Gazing at my shiny white kneecap, I lost all logic, all control. I simply cried.Â
At eighty, I was unprepared for this unexpected anatomy lesson: my twenty-nine years as a surgeon had simply not prepared me for viewing the inside of my own knee.Â
It felt like my life was over.Â
Fortunately my wife, Carolyn, a painter, four years younger than I, and without any orthopedic experience, took one look, said little, but acted.
She wrapped my naked bones in a clean
Bitter Medicine
Karen Libertoff Harrington
As a medical educator in a hospital setting, I often tell first-year medical students about disparities in health care and about the vastly different quality of care that hospitals deliver, depending on their resources.Â
I tell my students how important it is to advocate for patients, to learn to navigate the healthcare system and to work respectfully with health professionals in order to get optimal care for your patients.
When my own son was hospitalized, I had an opportunity to put my teachings into practice, and found them wanting.
It was a Thursday evening in early spring, the first hint of green emerging on the lawn of my suburban Connecticut home.Â
My son David
A TAB No More
Sandra Shea
I thought of Peter when I lost my TAB status.Â
I lost it on vacation. These things happen. Suddenly, one Friday night in Florida, I was no longer a TAB. Shouldn’t have been too surprised, I guess.Â
But I didn’t expect it would involve a chicken.
I should explain.Â
I’m a medical educator: I have a PhD in experimental psychology/neuroscience, and I teach first-year medical students. In our curriculum, the students work through patient cases that are grouped by organ system. At the end of each case, we have a wrap-up in which we highlight the case’s diagnostic features and answer any student questions. Most of these discussions are faculty-led, but occasionally they’re run by
Vanishing Act
Sudeep Dhoj Thapa
It was a summer night during my first year of medical school. Small bugs danced about the school buildings’ lights and filled the air with their penetrating hum.Â
In the television room, located across a small grassy lawn from the dormitories, I sat watching old movies with my classmate and friend Rajesh.Â
Rajesh was tall and chunky. He wore his thick, jet-black hair combed back, which made his broad face and smile appear even more so. I’d known him since our first days at medical school.
“Everyone in my hometown knows me,” Rajesh had told me. “I’m the first one in my area to go to medical school.” Clearly he enjoyed being the pride