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Surviving with Sisyphus
The patient in room 214 asks me and my attending if we can sit him up in a chair and bring him a Bible. He has a non-survival injury; wires and tubes tether him immovably to the bed. Even so, we tell him yes and leave the room. A medical student on a mission, I go in search of a chair.
Two doors down, the patient with no hands—they were amputated several days ago—yells out to the hallway:
“Hey! Hey! Is that Black man still out there?”
“Out, Out, Brief Candle!”
I grew up in a multigenerational two-family home in Queens, New York City, during the 1960s and Seventies. Every weekend, my grandparents prepared a feast for the whole family. Among them were my mother’s younger brother, Marvin, and his wife, Inge, an artist who’d immigrated from Germany.
They were childless, but Marvin delighted in his four nieces, including my sister and me. A professor of Shakespearean literature, he read Macbeth and King Lear to us when we were young, along with the more child-friendly works of Lewis Carroll.
The Call
I sink into the plane’s window seat, shade pulled down. My eyelids droop toward sleep. Next to me, headphones in place, my husband catches up on the latest Captain America movie.
I can almost forget that our young son and daughter sit in the row behind us, silent and still, plugged into the iPad for reruns of Good Luck Charlie. They sip the Cokes they never have at home. Together, we fly to Arizona for winter break. After months of working ten- to twelve-hour days as a physician in Connecticut, my body, mind and spirit ache for rest and sunshine.
I hear a distant announcement overhead, and one word grips my attention and snaps my eyes wide open:
Resilience Has a Voice, If We Listen
City of God is more than just a film. It is an unflinching depiction of organized crime in Brazil, as seen through the eyes of Rocket, a young boy who dreams of escaping the violence overwhelming his community, the Rio de Janeiro slum known as Cidade de Deus.
Watching the film as a high-school senior, I was struck by its raw, vivid storytelling and by the brutal realities of the country I call home.
Growing up in a stable Brazilian family, with access to education, health care and opportunity, I was fortunate.
Alice
Lying stuck in my hospital bed during the latest of many hospital stays, I reflected on the drastic turns and changes my life had taken.
For ten years I’d enjoyed a busy, fulfilling life as a pediatrician, educator and writer. Then, in the summer of 2020, my life had lurched from 100 miles per hour to a full stop. I’d become progressively weaker and easily grew winded when walking.
The Quiet Work of Dying
The first thing I remember is the sound of oxygen at night.
It was my second week as a hospice nurse. I had just pulled up to a modest home on a cul-de-sac, the kind of place where wind chimes echo off empty sidewalks. Inside, a man in his seventies was dying of end-stage pulmonary fibrosis. He was surrounded by family, but it was that soft hiss—steady and rhythmic, like an artificial tide—that centered the room.
His breathing was labored, yet peaceful. His wife sat beside him, holding one hand.
Dr. Poetry
You may imagine that this story will be about how poetry heals. And poetry does heal, but this story is not about that. Rather, it is a story of healing made possible by the relationship between physician and patient—of the power of words and metaphor, of being with and feeling seen, and of the human potential for posttraumatic growth.
We met on the eighth floor of the university hospital, after I was admitted for neutropenic sepsis (a serious infection coupled with low white-blood-cell count and often linked to cancer treatments) and a pulmonary embolism.
Medicine by the Books
Brrring!
The landline in my call room trills, jolting me awake. I have a consult. I’m a third-year medical student on my internal-medicine rotation. This is my second overnight call and second week of clerkship.
“Hi, Keith!” the caffeinated resident chirps. “I have a consult for you!”
The patient is Ms. Carrera: a young woman with a history of diabetes, renal disease and a recent heart attack. She’s here because her legs hurt. Cardiology and nephrology have no explanation, so they called internal medicine—and by extension, me. My shoulders slump.
Holding Out Hope
In my twelve years as an American family doctor working in low-resource countries in the Middle East, I’ve seen and treated countless patients with little to no hope for improvement in their physical and emotional problems. Seeing patients in these circumstances is emotionally exhausting, but the importance of my role in supporting these patients continues to draw me back in.
Reflecting on the challenges they face, I often think of one in particular: a baby named Hiba.
Hiba’s mother, Layla, had received very little prenatal care during her pregnancy, as is common among poor, rural patients in low-income countries. She’d suffered from several prenatal complications, and Hiba was born via an emergency cesarean section.
Hiba’s condition was precarious.