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Busting Grandma Out
S.E. Street
I had been in London on business all of seven hours when my son, Tom, called me at two in the morning from our hometown, Sydney, Australia.
“Grandma’s had a fall. She’s been taken to the hospital, but she’s all right.”
My mother’s having a fall was nothing unusual; she had always been an unpredictable fainter. My husband and children and I called it her party trick, making light of it to soothe her embarrassment.
She had no recollection of these episodes; one minute she’d be seated at the table, and the next, she’d be lying on her back on the floor, her feet propped up on a chair, with the family smiling down at her as if she were Sleeping Beauty awakening
A Doctor’s Dilemma
Jessica Zitter
It was my first day at my new job, practicing a new specialty. Having spent fourteen years as an ICU physician–including a four-year pulmonary/critical-care fellowship in this very hospital–I had just completed a palliative-care fellowship. Now I was the hospital’s palliative-care consult attending.
When I set eyes on the patient in room 1407, my first thought was: THIS LADY NEEDS TO BE INTUBATED–STAT!
The only trouble was that my job was to ease this patient’s passing, not to prolong her life.
The team had told me that Mrs. Zelnick, an eighty-two-year-old widow, was dying from pneumonia and didn’t want to be put on life support.
Seeing the Light
Sarah Houssayni
Many healers, teachers and parents have them.
At one point, I did, too. I had delusions. I thought I was a hero, a rescuer clad in a shiny white coat and wielding the sword of clinical wisdom.
I look back on those days with nostalgia and regret. I wish they’d lasted a little longer–my belief in my own medical grandeur and invincibility.
My most memorable patient changed that for me.
I remember how her mother, Gigi, first brought Serenity to see me when she was a newborn. Gigi was fifteen; I was
Rewriting the Script
Adam B. Weiner
Useless….
The word came unbidden into my head.
Oh, no. Here I was, only a few questions into Mr. Marlow’s medical history, and the feeling had begun already.
I’d often experienced this when I was a pre-med student, spending so much time on labs and textbooks instead of with patients. When I’d begun my first year as a medical student, I’d hoped to leave all that behind. Medical school felt energizing: I was ready to see real patients and start helping them!
The Well-Fed Physician
Randy Rockney
When I was in medical residency, more than thirty years ago, I ran with a pack of fellow residents, all guys who were fit to varying degrees. Once, on an outing, we discussed the–hopefully–hypothetical question: “If the need arose, which one of us would we eat first?”
“Randy!” my friends gleefully concluded.
“His meat would be the most marbled,” one added.
Fateful Encounter
Amy Eileen Hiscock
I cannot take my eyes from his face.
It has been destroyed in the wreck, along with the rest of his body. His head is misshapen, bloodied. Someone has tried to staple together one of the larger lacerations–extending diagonally across his face and under his chin–but there was little point. They gave up partway through.
I have never seen a dead body. I am twenty-five and in the second of five terms of nursing school.
Beating the Numbers Racket
Thuy D. Bui
“What’s my number?” shouted Betsy as I entered the examination room one day last fall.
“Oh, you mean your A1C? It’s nine-point-four!” I answered. A sentence sped through my mind: “The hemoglobin A1C number tells how well a patient’s diabetes is controlled–seven or less is good.” In my seven years as Betsy’s primary-care doctor, I’ve repeated this information at visits and included it in appointment reminders as well.
Betsy is a pale, stocky woman in her sixties, with short, neatly cropped hair. Her rather tentative smile, to me, always seemed a bit forced, as if covering up for underlying pain. And she’s had plenty of pain in her life.
Last Rites
Candice Carnes
In 2002, I was living in Albuquerque and working as a nursing assistant. My staffing agency had assigned me to a medical surgical floor at a hospital in Santa Fe, a fifty-minute drive away.
One day, as I was enjoying the high-desert beauty en route to the hospital, a code was called.
The patient’s name was Sam, as I recall. It could have been anything, but Sam is the name that echoes in my memories of that day.
His heart stopped.
I hadn’t arrived at the hospital yet, but I had been involved in enough codes to know what had been done.
Despite his advanced age, Sam had full-code status with no restrictions, meaning that he or his family had wanted everything
Continuing Education
H. Lee Kagan
The nasogastric tube was killing me. It had been in place for twelve hours now, threading its way up my nose and down my throat, past my esophagus, into my stomach. Try as I might, I couldn’t swallow away the nasty lump stuck to the back of my throat. And every time I tried, it hurt.
Decades before, as a physician-in-training in upstate New York, I’d put in more nasogastric (NG) tubes than I could remember. At the time, I hadn’t regarded NGs as a big deal. But now I was having my first personal experience with this vile little snake, and it sucked–in every sense of the word.
Two days before, I had come down with a viral gastroenteritis, or stomach