For eight years I have endured intense pain in my left jaw. While having four surgeries, I have also undergone Botox treatment, acupuncture and physical therapy; taken a variety of medications prescribed by pain doctors, neurologists and my primary care physician; and used specially made creams, ice and heat on the affected area. Nothing has worked.
Jef Gamblee
About the artist:
Jef Gamblee is a hospice chaplain from Westerville, Ohio. He first appeared in Pulse in December 2014. Jef is a second-career ordained Unitarian Universalist minister, having spent twenty-five years in commercial and corporate television as a director of photography. He keeps his hand in still photography to maintain his sanity.
About the artwork:
“As a hospice chaplain, I frequently visit adults with dementia who live in the ‘memory units’
Scott Janssen
“Why don’t you talk loud enough for the whole damn hospital to hear you?”
I’ve just greeted my eighty-four-year-old grandmother, and now this irascible voice has erupted from behind the curtain that separates us from whoever is sharing Grandma’s room.
The nursing assistant who showed me in glares across the curtain at the other inhabitant.
“You shut up,” she tells the person firmly, “or I’ll smack you with a bedpan.”
Then she leaves us alone.
The call came at midnight. “He died,” the voice on the other end said. No emotion.
“How are you, Alice?” I asked.
Startled out of sleep, I reflexively reach for my beeping pager. For a split second, I lie poised between wakefulness and terror in the pitch-dark resident call room, not sure where I am or what happened. I resolve to sleep with the lights on from now on.
I dial the call-back number.
“Pod A,” a caffeinated voice chirps. It’s Candice, one of the nurses.
“Hi. Amy here, returning a page,” I murmur.
“Oh, hi, Dr. Cowan,” she says. “I just wanted to let you know that the family is all here. They’re ready for the meeting.”
I married him in-between tours of Vietnam as a Navy junior officer, and even though we divorced after eight years, we stayed in touch and saw each other over the years.
When he emailed two years ago to say he’d been diagnosed with esophogeal cancer, I was concerned. But after radiation and an operation he wrote that his first two scans were good, and the doctors were hopeful. He was always a strong man and had been healthy, so I relaxed my fear somewhat.
When I wrote him a few months later, his reply was strange. He just said, “A lot is going on here,” and didn’t sign the note. He still worked as a lawyer, so I thought he was doing well and busy
This was the third time he coded. Dean had been in the ICU for over a week without any visitors, telephone calls, flowers or balloons. He came in after an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest which he survived and subsequently had another arrest halfway through his stay here. He sure was a fighter.
With special help from the ICU team, we found a contact number for his mother after doing some research on the internet. I was tasked to call her and inform her he was in the hospital.
Marc Tumerman
This is a story of two deaths. That these patients’ stories intersected on the same morning, in the same building, in two adjacent rooms, has left me thinking about them now that the day is almost done.
I was surprised to see Mrs. Stevens’ name on my schedule today. She came to the office last week, and I felt sure that she’d be too weak for another visit. But I was glad she’d made it, as I’ve become quite fond of her.
She’s seventy, and dying of metastatic lung cancer. She’s a lifelong smoker, but at this point I’m not worried about cause and effect, accountability and responsibility. None of that changes what I must do now as her physician.
Pris Campbell
His heart
is a battlefield
of scar tissue
and hardened walls
from radiation.
So certain the tumor
in his throat would take him
to his knees, wrench his life away,
they brought forth
the beast…that fairy tale
of modern medicine
gone wrong…and now
As a family-practice resident, I’ve found that a premium is placed not only on my clinical acumen but also on how well I respond to my patients’ mental and emotional experience of illness.
Yet the work of learning to be a doctor is just that–work. And in overwhelming amounts. Time management becomes ever more vital: As I take the time needed to gently break bad news and to console a patient, I must also stay conscious of the next patient’s appointment, the next phone call to make, the next exam to study for, the next lecture to attend, the next research project to complete and the next practice guideline to learn.
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