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A Skeptic Stands Corrected
Kyna Rubin
I’m prostrate in a Fujian hospital bed. It’s 1980 China, where I’m on a job interpreting for National Geographic–my first gig after graduate school. Fourteen-hour workdays have worn me down, and I’ve contracted bronchitis.
The clinic doctors are required to treat me with both Western and Chinese medicine, which explains the daily shots of tetracycline in my now bruised thigh and the grainy little brown pills I gamely down with boiled water.
“What’s in them?” I ask.
I think I hear something about deer’s antlers and bear sperm, and I don’t want to know much more. But I recover.
Was it the modern or the traditional treatment that
Losing My Vision
Sheila Solomon Klass
Sunday, September 26 of this past year began normally enough. I did what I do every day, first thing: I put on my glasses and tested my vision. I’m eighty-three years old, and although I’ve always been nearsighted and have lived with glaucoma for thirty years, I’ve developed a worse complaint: AMD, age-related macular degeneration, in my left eye.Â
My ophthalmologist diagnosed the AMD after I told him that, when I was reading, the print seemed faded and straight lines looked bent. I learned that AMD eats away at the macula, the central part of the retina, gradually destroying your ability to read, to watch television, even to recognize familiar faces. Today my left eye sees shapes and colors but no details;
The House Always Wins
Rashmi Kaura
Death. A five-letter word. The inevitable conclusion to our accomplishments, dreams, emotions and essence. Feared and ignored by the well, acknowledged and perhaps even welcomed by the ailing.
As physicians we are constantly gambling against this inevitability, playing the odds with our arsenal of diagnostics and therapeutics. Even when the odds against us grow longer, we forge ahead, bidding to prolong life through technology and wonder drugs.
Many times, staring into the tired, tortured eyes of a frail and debilitated patient while preparing to subject him or her to painful tests and treatments with a stroke of my pen, I wonder, Why do I insist on playing this game when the house is likely to win? Isn’t the whole point of gambling knowing when
Shujinwa Byoki Des
Lucy Moore
I don’t speak Japanese, but I can say “Shujinwa byoki des” (my husband is sick).Â
After spending a month in Bali studying art, sweating profusely and slapping mosquitoes, we were heading home to New Mexico, with a stop in Hiroshima on the way. Our first morning there, my husband, Roberto, woke with a fever of 103 and a full body rash.Â
The hotel had a thermometer, but no doctor. As Roberto’s fever neared 104, we hailed a cab for Hiroshima City Hospital. (That was when I pieced together shujinwa byoki des from my pocket dictionary.)
In the large, orderly waiting room, we were the only Caucasians. Roberto was a sight–lobster-red and wild-eyed. Staff and patients politely averted their eyes.Â
A nurse led us to the
Past Medical History
Donald Stewart
Tryst With The Microscope
Reeta Mani
“So what kind of doctor are you?” asks my new neighbor, peering curiously at the MD degree on my visiting card.
“I’m a microbiologist,” I tell her. “I work in the lab and help clinicians to diagnose infectious diseases.”
Her questioning look fades. “So you don’t see patients?”
“No,” I answer. “I don’t have to interact closely with patients, except in a few cases.”
She reflects for a moment, then says, “It’s good in a way. You can help them, but you don’t have to witness their pain and suffering up close.”
I agree. In fact, that was one of the biggest reasons why I decided to specialize in microbiology. (In India, after graduating from medical school you can go straight into a
The Calling
Lawrence Dyche
I am a non-physician who teaches physicians. A clinical social worker by training, I help doctors learn to be more compassionate and skilled in their human interactions. I sit in with residents as they see their patients. I help them to become better listeners, I remind them that as they touch the body they also touch the soul, I emphasize the enormity of witnessing. And after two decades of doing this work with innumerable students, I still regard the medical profession with awe–not simply the doctors but the calling, and the extraordinary way I’ve seen some people answer it.
Back in the Eighties, when I was beginning this work, I shadowed a resident for an entire day on the wards of a city
Things That Matter
Paul Gross
For me, the best part of being a doctor, and the biggest privilege, is getting to talk with people about things that matter.
“You look sad today,” I say to a patient I’m seeing for the first time–a thirty-eight-year-old woman with a headache. In response, her lower lip starts to tremble, and she wipes an eye.
As I reach for the box of tissues and hand it to her, I know that whatever has caused her tears will be more important than her presenting symptom.
A forty-five-year-old man comes in wanting help sustaining erections. When I ask for a few details, it turns out he’s having sex every single day of the week, and he’s finding it a challenge to maintain an erection
Food
Joanne Wilkinson
I have a stress test nearly every year. I do this because my mother dropped dead of a heart attack when she was thirty-six, and now I am thirty-five.
They stick EKG leads on me, and for weeks I have blotchy red circles on my skin where it’s reacted to the adhesive. I run on the treadmill. Sometimes the cardiologist scans my heart and arteries with ultrasound; other times, he injects me with a radioactive marker. Sometimes he looks at me as though I’m wasting his time. Sometimes he frowns and looks concerned when he hears about my family history.
I always pass the test.
Why did my mother have a heart attack? I don’t have satisfying answers for this. Was her