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Pained
Remya Tharackal Ravindran
The light from my pen torch strikes the steel-blue eyes of the patient lying before me. Her pupils stand wide open and still.
My pager’s shrilling pierces the quiet. Fumbling with the buttons, I read the message: “Call 7546 STAT.”
It’s my first rotation on the floor as a new internal medicine resident. I dial the number, various possible disasters bubbling through my head.
“The patient in 723, Mr. Martini, is complaining of severe abdominal pain,” says a nurse’s voice. “The day-shift resident ordered one milligram of morphine, but he refused it. I want you to come and evaluate him right away.”
“Can you give me
Crafting My Own Safety Net
Nicola Holmes
As I guide my car through the evening traffic, I feel tears on my cheeks.
I am a doctor who plans ahead: I write out plans for my patients. This has led to my nickname, “Plan Doctor.”
Each of my consultations is carefully crafted in separate steps. The conclusion is laid out in my own neat copperplate handwriting on a plain white page. (My father taught me to write copperplate. For hours every evening I would copy stencils of words he’d written out. At the time I felt persecuted; now each day, as my writing flows, I marvel at his wisdom.)
Each plan leaves the room with
First, Do No Harm
Alison Block
It’s one of my earliest memories: I’m wrestling with my brother, and I’m losing, because I’m five and he’s seven, and he’s bigger and stronger than I am. So I bite him, hard.
Instantly I know I’ve crossed some sort of line, and I employ my most primitive defense mechanism, shouting out, “He bit me! Jon bit me!” I feel shame, because I am old enough to know it is wrong to hurt people–and to lie.
Some years later, I am accepted to medical school. I go to the first ceremony of my medical career–the one where I get my short white coat–and I take a modernized version of the Hippocratic Oath. I will try to do the best I can for my
Finding a Way Home
Erin Imler
Stigmata
I started my third year of medical school as a surgery clerk.
With this eight-week clerkship came a flood of conflicting advice from older, wiser peers: “Ask a lot of questions, but speak only when spoken to.” “Offer to help, but stay out of the way.” “Be friendly and likeable, but not too friendly–or too likeable.” For the medical student, such is the mystique of the OR.
Three weeks into my general surgery rotation, I was helping my senior resident to see patients in the clinic and evaluate them for surgery. She grabbed the first chart off the day’s pile, knocked on the exam-room door and turned the handle, glancing at the chart before saying, “Hello, Mister–”
“Tran,” the patient finished.
Small Talk
Greg Fuson
Turns out I’m anemic.
As in, I have anemia. When I mention this, true friends will retort, “Yeah, you’ve been anemic for as long as we’ve known you.” Ha ha. (Assholes.) That’s because a true friend is comfortable enough to make fun of you; it’s the always-polite ones you have to wonder about. But that’s not where I’m going with this.
Apparently anemia is rare in males, and when it occurs, doctors want to figure out why. You get a phone call from your physician (“I want to run some tests”), hang up, try to finish what you were working on, and discover that you can’t. That it was
The End of Nice
“Mouse bite, one year ago” read the Chief Complaint entry on the chart I picked up from the “nonurgent” pile.
I was a second-year medical resident, on an eight-week stint in the Temple University Hospital emergency room. It was 3:50 am, the beginning of the end of the night shift. All hell could still break loose before my shift ended, but for now we were in a lull, and the less serious cases got our attention.
Goodbye From the ICU
Andrew R Carey
I do not know this man. I have never met him. All I know about him are the words typed in his medical chart–and that, before the day is out, he will die.
I have never heard him speak. I probably couldn’t pick him out in a crowd. Today he looks like a water bed: yellow, warm and squishy.
I wonder if he ever pondered what his last days might be like. Surely he hadn’t thought that at age forty-five he’d succumb to the final stages of hepatitis C, a disease he probably never knew he had. He’s been in this Boston ICU for forty days,
Awakening
Benjamin Ostro with Boris D Veysman
Back when I was a premedical student, I didn’t devote much time to community service. I cared about helping others, and yet, feeling as driven as I did to excel in my academic and extracurricular commitments, I had little time for volunteering.
It’s been my sense that most physicians don’t do much community service. If you ask a doctor why this is so, he or she might shrug and say something like “My work benefits the community” or “I’m already overworked.”
Upon entering medical school, I absorbed this attitude more or less unconsciously. I viewed volunteer work as “rewarding,” but devoid of any