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“It’s not like what they taught you.”
It is the winter of 2013. I am a second-year family-medicine resident, with big ideas and small experience. Brian is a staff physician, maybe three or four years into practice—years that might as well be decades. The two of us huddle in one corner of the little airport departure lounge in Sioux Lookout, Ontario.
A Weird Fit for Medicine
Editor’s Note: This piece was awarded an honorable mention in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”
Whenever the most recent piece of anti-LGBTQ legislation passes, the silence is a familiar song.
In November of 2022, we had the Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs—soon to be followed by a nonstop onslaught of legislative attacks on the LGBTQ communities’ right to exist. After each one, the silence blared.
I remember walking into work the day after the Club Q shooting. As I met my co-residents for 6:00 am patient sign-out, I felt weighed down, needing to will myself to focus. I was greeted with the usual smiles, heard the usual laughter, listened to the usual small talk.
Finding Freedom in Difference
Editor’s Note: This piece was awarded third place in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”
It was 3:00 am on my third night shift out of five, in a busy inner-city hospital in Sydney.
Having just reviewed six suicidal patients back to back, I felt tired and frustrated.
If I have to see another suicidal patient tonight…Why don’t they go and be suicidal somewhere else? I wondered wearily, then felt ashamed at the adversarial division I’d created: patient vs. doctor, them against me.
The Judgment of Solomon
As a cancer doctor, I’m no stranger to asking patients with a life-threatening malignancy about their wishes. My question generally goes something like this: “Going forward, do you want to pursue intensive treatment, or forgo it in favor of enjoying the time that remains to you, with relief for your symptoms as needed?”
Asking this question is an intrinsic part of my job. But when I found myself having to ask it of a family member, I felt shaken. This was different.
Borderlines
Editor’s Note: This piece was awarded second place in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”
When I started as an intern at a regional Australian hospital in the late Nineties, there was a patient—let’s call her Laura—who was notorious among the emergency-department staff.
Laura had sliced up much of her available skin over the years and had moved on to swallowing cutlery and razor blades. She’d had numerous operations to remove the silverware in her stomach, and countless sutures to stitch up the lacerations atop the old scars on her limbs and trunk. Over and over she would be discharged, only to turn up again with yet another macabre self-mutilation.
Each time, the surgical and emergency teams rolled their eyes and gritted their teeth.
Music and Medicine
It’s the end of a long day on Internal Medicine Ward H (“Hey” in Hebrew) at Soroka Medical Center, in the desert city of Be’er Sheva, Israel.
I’m a third-year medical student at the Medical School for International Health at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and this is the floor I’ve been assigned to for my six-week internal-medicine clerkship—my very first clinical rotation.
My fellow students and I wrap up our responsibilities for the day and head to the student room to gather our things. Stowing my stethoscope and notebook in my bag, I exchange it for my guitar, sitting in a dusty corner.
Invisibly Different
Editor’s Note: This piece tied for first place in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”
“That seems like a dumb way to die.”
“Why would anyone choose to do that to themselves?”
I hear my medical-school classmates pose these questions as we learn about how an acetaminophen overdose can cause painful, fatal damage to the liver. How each metabolite can tear apart a liver cell. How it takes hours or even days for the full extent of the overdose to be felt.
I sit silently, uninterested in engaging in the conversation. My mind wanders back to the cold February night nearly fifteen years ago that brought me to my suburban emergency room.
Shooter
Monday, August 28, 1:15 pm
Chapel Hill, NC
“Remain inside the building until further notice.”
The security alert on my phone screen is terse. Part of me is annoyed by its tone—long on commands, short on details. Sitting safely in my car after visiting a hospice patient, twenty miles from UNC’s hospital and university in Chapel Hill, I ignore the text, chalking it up to an overreaction by the security department.
The next alert, twenty minutes later, gets my attention. There’s an “armed and dangerous” intruder on campus.
Truth in Translation
Editor’s Note: This piece tied for first place in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”
I learned from my grandfather how to lie to doctors the same way that baby birds learn chirping: by mimicry.
“All healed,” I would translate for my grandfather at appointments. “I used to smoke, but not anymore.” “The pain is very faint.”
A good apprentice, I knew that he was lying, and I translated it anyway. I was eight years old, and a fast learner.