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We Pretend That We’re Not Afraid
Caitlin Bass
We stand outside in the heat. We swat at the occasional persistent mosquito. We try to ignore the sweat beading down our foreheads and the backs of our necks. We retreat to the deepest recesses of shade we can find. We wish for a hint of a wisp of a smidgen of a breeze. We hold court on life and love. We laugh and tease and are determined to have a good time. We could be in Atlanta or Austin or Anytown, USA.
We pretend that we’re not afraid.
We are afraid, though. Our fear is legitimate: Some people hate us. And some of them are armed and dangerous.
What Money Can Buy
Hind Almazeedi
Arwa arrives late to the clinic. Her husband is parked outside waiting for her.
“You missed your last two appointments,” I say, checking her records. It’s been four months.
“I didn’t have a ride,” she shrugs.
Many of my patients live close to the primary-care center in Kuwait where I work as a family physician, but the desert heat makes it impossible to come here on foot. Two minutes under the sun can leave you delirious, and if you have asthma, the sudden dust storms are a constant threat. Without an air-conditioned car, you’re essentially homebound.
I know this, so I don’t argue with Arwa.
What’s Love Got To Do With It?
H. Lee Kagan
My longtime patient Brenda let the top of her exam gown drop to her waist, stepped down off the exam table and turned to look at herself in the mirror. As I watched, she cupped her seventy-eight-year-old breasts in her palms and unceremoniously hoisted them up to where they’d probably resided when she was in her twenties.
“I’m thinking about having my boobs done,” she said. “My girlfriend had hers done, and she’s very happy with how they turned out. What do you think, doctor?”
As she spoke, her eyes remained on her reflection. Breasts held high, she made quarter turns to the right and left, then leaned back.
“I don’t like how they look now,” she said,
Tough Love
Maria Gervits
I miss Alba. I don’t know why, but I do. She was the most challenging patient I’ve ever had. I dreaded seeing her in the office–and yet, somehow, she won me over.
Alba was fifty-nine, with short, silver hair, a deep, gravelly voice from decades of smoking, and an attitude. She had lung disease, heart disease, depression, arthritis and HIV. She also had a complicated social situation. She’d used cocaine and heroin until her husband had died of HIV. She’d then moved in with her elderly mother and cared for her until her mother died of a stroke. Now Alba lived in a shelter right around the corner from where her father had been shot years before.
The biggest joy
Rendezvous
Raymond Abbott
Donald Wyatt. I have written of him before and did not plan to write about him again. Then, just today, something happened.
I was slated to meet him at the usual place. We’ve been having lunch together once a month for more than seven years. Not coincidentally, it’s been exactly that many years since I last worked as a social worker for a local mental-health agency. Donald was one of my clients. When I was about to retire, his mother asked me if I would have coffee or lunch with Donald once in awhile.
“Sure,” I said, never thinking it would
Morning Rounds
Veronica Faller
For my internal-medicine rotation as a third-year medical student, I was placed at Boston Medical Center, a large urban hospital that serves patients from all walks of life. My team included an attending, a pharmacist, a resident, two interns, two of my classmates and me.
Here is a snapshot of morning rounds with some of the patients I met, and of the emotions I experienced during my first weeks on the general-medicine ward. I refer to the patients by their illnesses not only for confidentiality but also to show how we sometimes identified them, despite our best intentions.
My First Patient: She comes in with altered mental status–confusion, sleepiness and memory loss–and she does not speak English. My resident tells me
Taboo
Ralph B. Freidin
Every fall, medical schools welcome nearly 20,000 college graduates. They arrive anticipating endless hours of lectures, too much coffee, and infinite facts to memorize. There is one thing they do not expect, however. I know. Forty-nine years ago, I was one of them.
The first day I walked onto the wards was in spring of 1967. I was in St. Louis, doing my second year of medical school. Previously my presence in the hospital had been restricted to the cafeteria. I was twenty-three, had only examined the eyes and ears of my classmates–never a patient–and was about to perform an unsupervised cardiac exam.
Anxiously, I waited with an instructor and three classmates outside the room of our assigned patient.
2:00 am
Katie Lin
It’s 2:00 am, and the fluorescent bulbs flicker gently overhead along the quiet hallways of the intensive-care unit.
Tonight I’m the ICU resident on call, and the weight of that title sits heavily on my shoulders. My team is in charge of keeping our critically ill patients safe from harm overnight. Although the supervising physician is only a phone call away, I’m the acting team lead for any codes called during the night on patients elsewhere in the hospital who may need our life-support services. Code Blue: cardiac arrest. Code 66: anything else requiring assistance.
The metronomic beeping of the life-support machines keeps time as I blink the weariness from my eyes and share a few muted smiles with the
A Second Farewell
Julie List
Two years ago, I’d just begun my new post as clinical supervisor at the caregiver-support center at a large medical institution. The center offers emotional and practical support to families of patients who are dealing with serious illnesses and hospitalizations.
In my short time there, I’d already encountered many memorable clients, but somehow I felt a special connection with one woman, Maria. A small, intense woman with piercing dark eyes, she often came to see us between her visits to her husband, Felipe, who lay gravely ill in the hospital’s cardiac intensive-care unit.
Always with Maria on her visits to Felipe were their three twentysomething daughters, Rosa, Alicia and Blanca. The family’s closeness touched me–especially when it became clear that Felipe’s