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Cover-up
Carol Scott-Conner
“The plastic surgeons tell me that women who like to swim do much better with reconstruction than with prostheses,” says a young breast surgeon at our weekly Breast Cancer Tumor Board, the working conference where we discuss every new breast cancer patient before starting treatment.
There’s a slight note of surprise in her voice; to her, it’s simply another consideration when advising women before mastectomy.
For decades, the only option after a mastectomy was a prosthesis, or breast form–something shaped and weighted to fill the empty cup of the brassiere and lie, more or less comfortably, against the chest wall. I sometimes tell my patients that using a prosthesis is a bit like going back to the days when we were little girls,
Getting a Grip
Raymond Abbott
“Ray, can you bring me some Poligrip?” says the message on my voice mail. “My teeth are falling out.”
I know Barbara means just her uppers, because she has no bottom teeth.
“I don’t get my check until Tuesday,” she adds. It’s now Friday afternoon.
I smile, thinking, Where does she think I might get Poligrip? Does she think I have a supply in my desk drawer?
The support staff, who have a lot of items, won’t have Poligrip. If I asked them for it, however, they too would smile.
Smile is the word you want to remember in this account, because Barbara makes me smile–and I especially value those who can do so these days.
Sharing Secrets
Maria Gervits
“I feel bad…” Amy whispered, then paused.
I’m a family-medicine resident, and I was doing my gynecology rotation, which involved spending a few days at a Planned Parenthood facility. This was my first day. I’d been assigned a patient to shadow: a young woman named Amy, who was here to have a first-trimester abortion.
I’m a fan of Planned Parenthood’s work providing high-quality, affordable contraceptive and gynecological care. In college, when I lost my health insurance, I’d gone to Planned Parenthood for birth control. Now, as a doctor in training, I was curious to see how the clinic worked from the inside.
Bonding Time
Nelly Schottel
As an intern in the neonatal intensive-care unit (NICU), I am one of several doctors who rarely see or touch the tiny patients we treat. We sit in a back room off a distant hallway, far removed from the babies, reviewing lab results and blood gases on the computer. Much of the time I feel like the Wizard of Oz, controlling a marvelous machine from behind a curtain.
The only uninterrupted time I have with my patients comes at 5:30 am, during pre-rounds, when I hurriedly examine my ten small, complex charges. This is the most rushed part of the day, but these are also the rare moments that I actually spend with a patient.
(Not So) Golden Years
Madge Kaplan
When I read news articles about caring for elderly parents at a distance, I sometimes shake my head. There’s a tendency to put the best spin on the experience: as long as you contact the right people, get the right information and treat the ups and downs as just part of life’s challenges, you’ll be fine. You can do this!
I find myself wondering when the author last talked to a caregiver at her wits’ end–emotions and finances drained, logistics spiraling out of control.
I was a long-distance caregiver for twelve years. I believe it’s best to resist a formulaic approach in favor of one informed by the details–and always, always, humbled by the truth.
Dear Joseph
Michael Terry
I stood right beside them as they slowly slid your head into a plastic bag, looped the coarse twine about your neck and tied it tightly. Like the amateurs they were, they double-knotted it to make sure nothing came loose or dripped out. Then they casually walked away, chatting about what would come next.
Within minutes the bag fogged up, and a clear red liquid pooled at the bottom.
That was just the beginning of the ritual.
I’m sure that under other circumstances you would have put up a fight, Joseph, but today you were no match for them. No matter that they were six slender twenty-somethings, and you at least six feet and 250 pounds; you were on their turf and utterly
Secret Admirer
Kristen Nace
You will never see my face or know my name. You probably won’t give much thought to what happens to your blood after your doctor says, “I think we need to run some tests,” and the phlebotomist draws it into the tubes with their colored tops. I know I never did, until I became a medical laboratory technologist.
Over the course of a normal day at the hospital lab, my coworkers and I process hundreds of patient specimens–everything from blood to bone, from sputum to spinal fluid. Twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, the specimens come to us from the hospital’s ER and ICU, from doctor’s offices and nursing homes, from the inpatients on the floors above us and from outpatients
The Couple Next Door
Kelly McCutcheon Adams
In 2005, my husband and I bought a small farmhouse in northern New England next door to Tom and Sally.
They were in their early seventies, married nearly fifty years, with a large family. Tom’s grandfather had built a farmhouse in 1900 on the family’s small pig farm. In the 1970s, Tom and Sally had parceled off the land and built a modern house for themselves, a stone’s throw from the old farmhouse that eventually became ours.
All in a Night’s Work
Isaac Song
I was a college freshman, just starting out as a rookie EMT with the local rescue squad. In the squad building, located near a strip mall in our suburban New Jersey town, my fellow volunteers and I joined the staff supervisors to spend days or nights on call.
On a rescue squad, I quickly learned, patience is key. If you visited the building, you’d see seasoned EMTs lounging around as if they had nothing better to do. They had developed a subdued alertness that let them relax while also being ready to leap into action. Unfortunately, I had yet to cultivate this quality; I sat in silence, jittering apprehensively.