fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

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Thanksgiving 2023

It has been years, decades really, since I have watched television. I have the box, watch movies, but haven’t had cable ever. My two children were in first and second grade when I divorced their dad, and the house we moved into had no reception.

“Oh, well,” I told them, “no TV.” They were too little to grumble, but years later my daughter thanked me, saying, “We did so many other things.”

Now I find myself newly single and in transition for the winter, living in a rented house with—you guessed it—a TV with a full complement of channels and full reception. I have been here for two months and just now tried—for the second time—to figure out the dizzying array of options, trying to get to something I actually wanted to watch.

My reason for trying this again yesterday is that it was Thanksgiving morning. I was futzing around cooking for a small party and wanted to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. After an astoundingly small number of trials, there it was!

Not a half an hour into it, putting finishing touches on stuffing, I sat for a few minutes in front of the tube and found myself tearing up. Crying at a holiday parade.

The vivid memory that unexpectedly opened this floodgate dated from about forty-five years ago.

Before becoming a doctor, I worked for ten years as a nurse. For about eight of those years, I worked as an inpatient nurse at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. This was in the late Seventies and early Eighties: Among the very ill oncology patients were also the first groups of gay men dying in droves of a disease at first unnamed, and now known as HIV/AIDS.

I mostly worked night shifts, 11:00 pm to 7:00 am, and frequently walked home to my studio apartment near Lincoln Center, the walk taking me across Central Park. On one particular Thanksgiving eve, I spent all of my night helping a young man with unrelenting leukemia hang on to what tenuous shreds of life he could.

As so often with acute myelogenous leukemia (AML), short remissions would be followed by brutal relapses, followed by more chemotherapy, combating the horrible side effects with unending antibiotics, antifungals and transfusions. Many medicines caused profoundly low potassium, which required IV replacements, all through the patients’ increasingly sparse peripheral veins. We floor nurses managed all of this.

This young man was married and had two school-age boys. To this day I can picture his room on the fourth floor. His wife had been staying with him almost constantly in those last days, when his battle was being lost in true misery.

I knew that their boys were gearing up for football games over the holiday weekend.

“Will they come to say goodbye to their dad?” I asked his wife.

“No,” she told me. “I don’t want their memory of every Thanksgiving after this to be the horror of seeing their father die, with all of the lines in his body, and the blood, and the mess of it all….”

That night I was in the room more often than not, checking lines, listening for signs of worsening distress, chasing labs and interns. In the morning I left exhausted, sure that I would not see this family again. I did not.

My slow walk home that Thanksgiving morning took me across Central Park West, where the Macy’s Parade was making its way south to 34th Street. The sidewalks were crowded with families cheering the colorful procession on. I saw one very happy family man with a few frolicking boys, the youngest one riding on his shoulders for a better view—and the tears poured out of me in grief and anger at what seemed an absurdly unfair hand dealt to my sick family.

I pushed my way through crowds and clowns, past tourists and trombones, to my apartment less than a block away, and cried myself to a brief sleep.

That Saturday, I grabbed a bus to New Jersey, rushed into the warm and welcoming arms of my mom and whatever assorted siblings and friends were around and soothed my sorrows in their food, love and understanding. Not that I ever said much about my nights, just: “It was a tough shift.”

This was just one of many tough shifts I had in those days. There were many mornings of tears, and throughout the fall and winter I spent almost every Sunday evening going to the local Lutheran church, where they had vespers and performed Bach cantatas.

In that lovely setting, hearing that music that resonated so deeply, I would pour out my sadness. And very often I would silently rail at God.

Why the hell do these people and their families have to suffer so much, over weeks and years? And where the hell are You in all this?

Those years as a cancer nurse guided both my faith and my path to becoming a doctor. My friends and colleagues had assumed that I would go into oncology—but it was the care we nurses were able to give our patients and their families, and the importance of knowing all of their medical histories, and understanding what made them cry at night, that drew me in. And family medicine has been my career for more than thirty years.

I have taken these many patients and their experiences with me and let their voices guide me as I’ve cared for families over many decades. And after so many years of my asking the “why bad things happen to good people” questions, God and I still talk—although now I do more listening, and it’s a bit more of a two-way conversation.

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Laura Fry, a family physician, has been in practice for thirty years and is nearing retirement. “Medicine was a second career, as I began as a nurse, mostly in oncology. While working as a nurse in New York City, I took premedical classes in the evening after my day shifts, or before night shifts. My nursing career informed me mightily about how I would practice medicine. I am 95 percent retired as of this past April, when I turned seventy. I am still doing house calls, as I have done all my career, often guiding patients and their families at the end of life. I visit our most vulnerable patients at our health center in Manchester, NH. This story, along with many other holiday shifts as a nurse and as a doctor, seems to have been incorporated into my very center; thus my depth of emotion this week.”

Comments

15 thoughts on “Thanksgiving 2023”

  1. Laura, I loved your story. I too was an R.N. prior to going to medical school. Being a nurse has made me a better doctor, and I look back at those memories and how they shaped me into the person I am today. I too grew up without a T.V., we read books and never regretted it.

  2. This is beautifully written. I also have conversations with God and am also a Family Medicine doctor for many of the same reasons. It takes courage to stay engaged with God and life in the midst of heartache and suffering. Thanks for sharing this moving story.

  3. Zoran Naumovski, MD

    Wow! Beautiful and heartfelt piece. Thank you for sharing. I can relate to your story, at least to some degree. I, too, have had similar conversations with God, inquiring why so many bad things happen to our patients. As you enter the next phase of life in retirement, I recommend you consider an encore career…continue to write please! We (in healthcare) need to tell and share these stories. And you do it beautifully.

  4. I was most fortunate to work with you to see what kind of doctor you truly are. I’ve learned so much from you and think it’s the greatest honor in my career to have somebody like you cross my path! your love, kindness, and empathy was very strong in the way you practiced medicine.

  5. Ann Bradley Hebert

    Laura, Thanks for sharing this caring and deeply moving life chapter. As a retired nurse of 40 years who absolutely loved her career, you reached a goal that I often dreamed of ….to move into the role of physician, but I had other goals to focus on. I was so fortunate to work with you and admire the devoted and skilled care which you provided.
    Your story is beautifully written, and tells how caregivers work through the tough days and treasure the memories and families whom we’ve cared for. You are a hero!

  6. Decades ago, I worked as a Child Life Specialist in a busy pediatric unit. I often worked holidays. Being there for kids and their families on days like that was a holy act, and although it was many, many years ago, I will always remember what it felt like.

    1. Congrats on an outstanding career in two phases—caring for and caring about others the whole way. I, too, had a dual job path, first as a police officer and then as a physician (long story). Along the way I gave up on the idea of an all loving and all powerful god. I now see the creative force in interactions between people, a force that you, Dr. Fry, apparently wielded, and continue to wield, in a magnificent manner. Thanks for being you.

  7. Laura,
    As your friend and colleague for many decades, I knew you had a beautiful soul; but I did not know that you could write so beautifully, as well. You are an artist of both medicine and words.
    With admiration,
    Don

  8. Ah Laura! This is beautiful. Thank you for having the courage to be so open and vulnerable, and loving about your work. As a recently retired nurse after 50 years of practice, I share your thoughts and obvious love for the work. A privilege indeed.

    Right now, most importantly, I beg you to continue writing and publishing. The time is ripe in our shattering country and world for stories such as yours to teach compassion. Thank you for sharing your story. I am indeed experiencing Thanksgiving’s true meaning. Bless you!

  9. What a heartfelt piece. As a cancer survivor, I can relate to this. Dr Fry is an amazing individual- truly God sent. Thank you for posting this. Thank you for your immense compassion, empathy & kindness.

  10. Louis Verardo, MD, FAAFP

    What a loving and heartfelt piece you’ve written, Dr. Fry. I consider it a privilege to have read something so personal and so representative of your dual clinical careers. Your patients and your colleagues were so fortunate to have you.

  11. What a beautiful story of your experiences as a nurse and doctor. If it were not for ICU nurses in 1976 in Memphis UT Bowling, I would never have survived a 3 month stay on respirator, fully paralyzed and fully dependent on them. I was a scared 20 yr old. One night nurse in particular, Jean, would hold my hand and talk with me {you know I was unable to talk on the respirator then}. Thank you for being there for all those unable to “do” for themselves, and for the love you shared in their final days. I just typed an interview for a Navy Chaplain who also helped many thru the AIDs epidemic, from blood transfusions and all. Thank you for caring

  12. Thank Giod for your skill, compassion and caring.You have given comfort and
    Presence to many.MORE than you realize.
    Please share your experience with new physicians so they too can go the extra mile!!
    Thank you Sister Mary Norberta ,RN,FNP,
    Hospital Administrator.

  13. Henry Schneiderman

    This is a superb story of compassion and the moral distress we experience at the misfortune of our patients. Besides being a very talented writer, Doctor Fry embodies something I have long believed: that a background as a CNA, an LPN, or as here, an RN makes for the most kind, effective, compassionate physicians. Palliative care physicians proudly say that we are the most nurse-like of doctors. Innate in this story is that the response to what we cannot fix is to help as we may, bear it, and go on; and to recognize that the gift of self and time is immense even when the course is of suffering up to death.

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