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Mad Man
Zach Reichert ~
In my third year of medical school, I started a rotation at the nearby VA hospital. Walking toward the polished glass doors that morning, I saw my reflection–clean white coat, assured expression to cover up how lost I felt. It was my second clinical rotation ever, and my first time at the VA.
I found my team and soon met a patient I’d be seeing for the next month. His name was Jim. He’d already been hospitalized for a week–and he wasn’t leaving any time soon.
At seventy, Jim had no muscle or fat on his body. His gray skin hung like a sheet over the ridges of his skeleton, and his bony arms were
Fan Favorite
I was a third-year medical student, doing my internal-medicine rotation in a large regional teaching hospital.
“We have a new admit that I want you to pick up,” my team’s senior resident told me on my third day. “Mr. Ngo is a seventy-one-year-old man with congestive heart failure. He came into the ER with worsening shortness of breath and edema.”
I read Mr. Ngo’s chart and went to his hospital room. He sat on the edge of his bed, his labored breathing obvious even from the doorway.
“Hello, Mr. Ngo, my name is Phillip,” I said. “I’m a medical student, and I’ll be assisting in your care.”
Eye-Opener
Daniel Lee ~
1. Bipolar disorder
2. History of postpartum psychosis
3. No custody of her children
4. In treatment for cocaine abuse
5. Regular smoker
I digest each of these facts on the computer screen in rapid succession, progressively cementing the picture of Renee Pryce, a twenty-eight-year-old woman in her final months of pregnancy.
I’m a first-year resident in a large urban county hospital. In the course of my training, I’ve learned that some people (mostly older doctors) find the electronic medical record (EMR) burdensome and inefficient.
Hooked
I walked into the room of a dying man. This phrase might conjure up the image of a frail, white-haired patient peacefully nearing the end of life. Alex, however, was thirty–just two years older than me.
I was a third-year medical student doing a rotation in the ICU. This first encounter was sadly inglorious: As my team entered Alex’s room, the police officer who’d been guarding him walked out, leaving Alex handcuffed to the bed.
Alex looked like a ghost, his cheeks sunken and lifeless. A heart infection caused by his IV drug use was spewing dangerous bacteria through his bloodstream, infecting his lungs and spine. When not sedated, he was delirious, eyes staring wildly between wasted temples.
The Memory Unit
Ann Anderson Evans ~
I arrive in the memory unit at 1:30 in the afternoon. Jean, my mother’s sister, is fast asleep in her hospital bed in Room 1410. For the past ten years, it has fallen to me to be her frequent visitor and care monitor. I do this willingly because without her generosity and compassion, my life would have been far less meaningful and enjoyable. She never married, but my brothers and I honored her on Mother’s Day. My brothers sometimes drive here from their distant homes for a bedside family reunion.
During her decades of charitable work, Jean was named Recycler of the Decade by the New Jersey Department of the Environment, received the New Jersey Pride Award from
All I Could Do
The clinic in rural Haiti is a small stucco building with no electricity or running water. The temperature inside the clinic is 103 degrees, and there is no breeze. The examining-room walls are only seven feet high and afford no privacy.
This is my fourteenth trip to Haiti as a volunteer pediatrician. My twenty-fifth patient of the morning is a three-month-old infant named Joceylyn Marquee, who is completely swaddled in a dirty blanket and is carried in by her mother, Lucie.
In our tiny cubicle, Lucie sits with Joceylyn on her lap. The interpreter, Fredeson, and I are also seated. We’re all so close together that our knees touch. The acrid smell of human dirt, sweat and anxiety
What Did the Doctor Say?
Here’s what they should have told you: “We found cancer in your lymph nodes, your liver, your lungs and your brain. It explains your weight loss, your difficulty breathing and your loss of appetite. This wasn’t just your depression, like you thought. It started in your lungs, and now it’s everywhere. This cancer has been growing for quite some time. You cannot, even with the strongest medications and the longest surgeries, make this cancer disappear. It is too powerful. It is here to stay.”
They should have said, “We wish we had better news, but it looks very serious. Still, we’re here to care for you. We will not let you feel alone. Imagine the place you want to spend
Tucking Him In
I need to see Justin before my workday commences. I’m a social worker at the outpatient cancer center where Justin has been treated for an aggressive colon cancer.
Seeing him today means visiting him in the hospital, up the road from the center.
It’s almost surreal.
When I first met Justin, nearly two years ago, he looked every bit the linebacker–well over six feet tall, with a girth to match. A man in his late fifties, he had a booming voice and an engaging personality. He was married, a successful wining-and-dining stockbroker, active in his town and in the local Italian American Society.
A Soldier’s Tale
“You ever work with vets?” asks the young man sitting across from me in the hospital waiting room.
He’s been sitting there all morning. So have I. Since 5:30 am, my father-in-law, age eighty-eight, has been undergoing surgery to remove a tumor in his lung. The surgeons just sent word that they’ve finished, and my wife and her mother have gone to the post-op room to see him.
Waiting for them to return, my wife’s sister and I have been talking about her son, who’s thinking of joining the Air Force.
“Warn him about the recruiters and their shiny promises,” I say. “Tell him they’re all a bunch of liars.”
“That’s for damn sure,” the man says.
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