- Home
- /
- Stories
Stories
Giving Care
Ronna L. Edelstein
When I was six, my family and I spent a week in Atlantic City. I loved the Boardwalk with its saltwater-taffy aroma and colorful sights, but I feared the pier that jutted far out into the Atlantic. One moonless night, my big brother bet me a bag of taffy that I couldn’t walk to the pier’s end by myself. Never one to back down, I accepted his bet. But the farther out I walked, the more frightened I got. It felt like one more step would send me off the pier’s edge and into the bottomless black water. My parents rescued me by dashing to the end of the pier and carrying me back to safety.
I spent the next half-century living
Touched
Karen Myers
“I can feel the life force leaving me,” Mike says as he massages my legs with his rough, careful hands. He doesn’t use oil or lotion like the other massage therapists. Just his sticky, Marlboro-scented fingers. I lie in my underwear beneath a green sheet. My bony shoulder blades and crooked spine press into the table, having long since lost their cushion of muscle.
“We’re getting older,” Mike says, even though we’ve barely reached forty. “Maybe that’s why we’re so afraid. We don’t have the energy to fight like we used to.”
Mike’s eyes bulge like a bullfrog’s. When I first knew him, I found them a bit frightening. His voice is raspy and deep. He has a fading tattoo on his left
To My Left
Anne Herbert
I walk down the airplane aisle, scanning the rows. My eyes finally fall on 15F. My seat.
My nightmare.
This window seat means only one thing to me: someone to my left. A man, to be exact–middle-aged, reading the New York Times and snacking on a bag of peanuts. He doesn’t notice as I shove my purse under the seat and sit down. My only thoughts are of blending in–with the other passengers, with the chair, with the plane itself. Anything.
My objective on this five-hour flight is simple and clear. It’s the same one that I cling to almost every second of every day: to keep my left side hidden from the world.
Everyone has a good side–a more photogenic side, a certain way
Piece of Work
Jennifer Frank
“You’re a real piece of work!” he spat at me. He was a patient named Martin; I was the supervising physician, trying to role-model for a second-year resident how to conduct a difficult conversation with patients like this.
So far, not so good.
At first glance, Martin seemed an ordinary-looking older man, with close-cut gray hair and plain-framed eyeglasses. But I was struck by his scowl–he was expecting an argument, perhaps because during his interview with the resident he’d already encountered some pushback.
He’d brought a long list of laboratory tests that his biofeedback “doctor” had instructed him to get, saying that his fatigue and other symptoms were caused by “adrenal dysfunction.”
I scanned the list–thyroid, blood count, chemistries, vitamins, adrenal function. “Testing
Counting Cards
Alexandra Godfrey
Once again, I see a still heart. As I stare at the fetal monitor, I search for signs of life. The screen flickers; my son’s heart does not.
The last time I saw him, he looked happy–content in his life-bubble. As he turned somersaults, he waved at me. I had thought he was saying hello, but I realize now that he was waving goodbye.
Soon I must deliver his still form into the world. My labor will be difficult–his cries exchanged for my tears; his body, small and membranous, fitting into my one hand.
This is not what I had envisioned. I had dreamt of my son’s vitality, not his mortality. I contemplate the suffering–is there no way to tally up the trauma?
Each Day, Same Story
Jennifer Reckrey
Editor’s Note: Jennifer Reckrey is a family medicine resident in New York City. Each week, while she was an intern, she recorded some of her experiences as a brand-new doctor.
I have been his primary doctor for the entire three weeks he has been on the hospital floor. Sometimes he drives me crazy. Once or twice I’ve asked my senior resident to take over for a bit so I can hide out, catch my breath and try to get some of my other work done. Yet despite his daily demands and my hours of exasperation, I have never felt this connected to a patient before.
Over these weeks, I have watched his health slowly but steadily deteriorate. He first came to the hospital
Breaking Bad News
Bad news is like a lump of red-hot coal that lands in your palm–and that you can’t let go of, no matter how badly you’d like to.
I was tossed the burning coal over twenty years ago, when I was thirty years old and fit as a fiddle. Or so I thought. I also happened to be a first-year medical student, having my head filled with facts large and small about the human body.
Then something started to go wrong.
Coming Full Circle
Stacy Nigliazzo
Only thirty minutes into my evening ER nursing shift, and I was already behind. My first patient was a pregnant teenager with heavy vaginal bleeding. “About three months, I guess,” she flatly replied when asked about her last period. As we placed her legs in the stirrups for the pelvic exam, torrents of blood and water rolled into the kick bucket on the floor.
Dr. Parkman had barely opened the speculum when we saw it. I knew she couldn’t see the doctor’s face, but she could see mine. Shielding her from my expression, stunned and speechless, I cowered as best I could behind her left knee.
There it was. Tiny, pink and perfect. Her baby’s hand, so small that it would easily fit
Brain Cutting
Emma Samelson-Jones
The page came to my resident, who grinned and looked over at me, his hovering medical student. “You should go to this.”
I looked down at the pager.
“Brain Cutting. 2:30 PM. Room B157.”
Text pagers are the indifferent bearers of all news. Emergencies–“Smith, BP 60/30, Room L721”–appear in the same font as messages seemingly borrowed from a teenager’s cell phone: “OMG, the harpist in the hospital lobby is playing ‘My heart will go on’ from Titanic. WTF?”
I dutifully took the elevator down to the hospital basement and opened the door to the morgue. The medical examiner and a group of neurology residents and students were gathered around a steel table, its sides sloping gently down to a central drain.
As more