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Code Blue
Stephen W. Leslie
I was startled awake at 3:40 am by a loudspeaker blaring “Code Blue…Code Blue.”
As the hospital’s newly hired chaplain intern, I’d been sleeping in the overnight room. Stumbling out of bed and groggily changing out of my pajamas, I made sure to put on my hospital badge.
I made my way to the hospital’s “Z” building, where the ICU was located, and took the elevator to the fourth floor. The elevator opened onto a row of doorways, each decorated with a red warning sign: “Stop! Do Not Enter. Authorized Staff Only.”
I picked one and went through.
I’d guessed right: At the far end of a hallway, a group of gowned nurses swarmed around a woman lying in a hospital bed,
Nothing to Hide
About thirty years ago, after I’d completed my internal medicine residency and a rheumatology fellowship, my wife and I moved with our three-year-old son to my wife’s hometown.
There I joined a multispecialty group practice as the second rheumatologist. Over time, the plan was for me to build a rheumatology practice, but while that was happening I took on all kinds of patients, both primary-care and intensive-care. I felt very comfortable doing general internal medicine, and I also liked the intensity of ICU work.
Hurricane Sandy: Two Tales of One City: Part 2
Not Your Usual Halloween
Hey Manisha,
Last night–Halloween–I went and volunteered at a shelter in a school basement/gymnasium in the Nineties on the Upper West Side.
There were more than 100 folks staying there, mostly evacuated from the Lower East Side. The shelter, run by the City, had some volunteers at the front desk, a few security people, a medical team that consisted of myself, one other doctor and a nurse (volunteers through the NYC Medical Reserve Corps–if you’re a provider, you can sign up online; it only takes fifteen minutes), and more than twenty awesome volunteers of all ages.
It was a mess.
Quite a few folks staying there
Hurricane Sandy: Two Tales of One City
Editor’s Note: Hurricane Sandy hit New York, Pulse‘s home, on Monday, October 29. Eleven days later, many parts of our area are still limping toward recovery. Today we bring you two stories, rather than the usual one, about the hurricane’s impact. The first is by a medical student who was suddenly thrust closer to his newly adopted city. The second is an e-mail written to a colleague by a family physician who volunteered time in a City shelter.
Just three short months ago, I took my first steps into the medical world when I put on my white coat and began my first day as a student
No Red Lights
Loreen Herwaldt
As far back as I can remember, I’ve deliberately spent my life on the high road. I was the seventh-grader who was told by adults that she was very serious. I was the college student who majored in chemistry because it was the strongest premed major. I became a doctor.
Before becoming a doctor, I imagined that I would be the epitome of compassion. I envisioned pausing for a moment before I saw each patient to pray for that person and to ask for wisdom. During my last two years of medical school, I enjoyed hanging out with my patients, just listening to their stories. I
Five Years Later
Steve Lewis
Evenings in the Sloan-Kettering ICU were starkly lit–nowhere to hide from the glare, bloodshot eyes trained on blinking lights, buzzing machines, masked men and women passing soundlessly through sliding glass doors, and little but hours and hours of bright, eerie luminosity ahead.
By contrast, the days then were dark. No comfort to be found in the sunrise or in that old salve about everything looking better in the morning. My wife and kids and I sat on the edge of uncomfortable couches in dimly lit waiting rooms where the waiting was always either too long or never long enough; we stood shoulder to shoulder in airless elevators with strangers sharing the same muted despair; we sat huddled in the cafeteria and did not
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.
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.
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.
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