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Dying Woman

Gary Hoff October 4, 2013 2 Comments

Gary Hoff

About the artist:

I am Associate Professor of Medicine at the Des Moines University College of Osteopathic Medicine where I have taught cardiology for many years. My career as an artist runs in parallel with my career in medicine. My work is primarily in oils and consists of commissioned portraits as well as landscapes and still life.

About the artwork:

“Dying Woman is a portrait of my mother during the last month of her life, as she was dying of metastatic lung cancer. The drawing is in an old medium called silverpoint, which was the method used by old master painters long before graphite. It allows a precise but unerasable line

One Last Sale

Judith Reichtein September 27, 2013 1 Comment

Judith Reichtein

“Did you sell the business yet?”

I marvel at my patient Jack: despite his breathlessness, he’s somehow managed to greet his wife Sara with a complete sentence. Given his condition, it’s truly amazing.

Most of his lung function has been devastated by his forty-year, pack-a-day smoking habit; the rest has been demolished by cancer. The easy, automatic breathing he once took for granted is just a memory. He can’t even lie down without feeling like he’s suffocating. Propped up on pillows in his hospital bed, he struggles for every breath–pulling it in, forcing it out–his brow creased in a perpetual frown of concentration.

Sara and Jack have been married for thirty-five years, since before he took over his father’s small shoe

We Were Both New That Day

Bernadine Han September 13, 2013 1 Comment

Bernadine Han

We were both new that day.

He had come for a new knee.
I was doing my first admission.

Suddenly he was short of breath.
He’d had a cough for a long time, yes,
with blood in it.

He decompensated,
and I watched him.

The Pronouncement

Carl V. Tyler June 14, 2013 No Comments

Carl V. Tyler

I knew from last night’s house call that my patient Bessie’s time was near. All day long I’d felt the familiar churning inside, the sickly sweet combination of anticipated dread and anticipated relief. So when the phone rang while I was exercising at home, I wasn’t surprised. I quickly dropped the barbell weights to answer the call before it went to voice mail.

It was Bessie’s daughter, Susan.

On the Road

Josephine Ensign May 17, 2013 No Comments

Josephine Ensign

As a community health nurse, I work with homeless and street-involved teenagers. In almost thirty years of doing this work on both coasts, and in Thailand and Venezuela, I’ve gotten to know thousands of young people living on the margins of society.

I love working with them; they challenge me to see the world–and myself–in a broader way, one that opens up vistas of hope for positive change and a better future.

And I always find myself touched by their hopefulness and vulnerability. Their level of optimism varies depending on many factors: their socioeconomic background and level of education, their intelligence and social skills, their involvement with foster care, and factors such as the general level of chaos they experienced growing up, and

What to Say When You’re Terminal

Ellen Diamond May 3, 2013 No Comments

Ellen Diamond

For the past fifteen years, I have had an incurable form of leukemia.

Such diseases used to be called terminal illnesses, but we don’t hear that term as much anymore. With all the new drugs and treatments available, doctors have become more reluctant to refer to diseases they can’t cure yet as “terminal.”

In the years just after my diagnosis, when friends and family would ask what could be done for it, I used to say that nothing could be done, adding: “It’s terminal.”

I was trying to be honest, to say, “Come now, we must face this.” People’s reactions of shock and sadness, though, made me wish I’d put it some other way. But what other way?

My father,

Cross-Examination

Paul Rousseau March 22, 2013 No Comments

Paul Rousseau

“I want everything done. Please, Dr. Rousseau, do everything. We have two children–they can’t be without their father. Do you understand? Do what it takes to keep him alive!”

Angie, a petite woman with long blonde hair, fixes me with piercing blue eyes. Her husband, Joe, fifty-two, has scleroderma, an autoimmune disease. In its most devastating form, it hardens the skin and destroys the kidneys, heart and lungs.

Joe is dying of sepsis and multi-organ failure in my hospital’s intensive-care unit.

“Please, do whatever it takes to keep him alive,” Angie pleads.

Suddenly, I am thrust into the depths of grief. Not hers, mine. It happens just like that–no warning, no nothing, just a painful inner quivering and

Palliative Care

Stacy Nigliazzo March 8, 2013 No Comments

Stacy Nigliazzo

When I cut the stem
I knew it was just a matter of time.

I cleared the sill
and filled a crystal vase.

The petals unfurled.
The smell of summer pierced my skin

for three days.
When the first leaf fell

I added lemon pulp and crushed
an aspirin;

cut away all that waned–
the shoots were spry

one last day.
I scattered them over green earth.

Flecks of pollen
stained my lips and cheekbones.

About the poet:

Stacy Nigliazzo is an ER nurse. Her poems have appeared in Pulse, JAMA, Bellevue Literary

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Note to My Patient

Sarah Stumbar January 11, 2013 No Comments

You might be surprised to know that I’m lying here in bed still thinking of you two weeks after you’ve died.

During the month that I watched you die, I often wondered what it felt like to be you, with your deep, husky voice, rounded belly and stubborn anger. You’d once owned your own mechanic shop; now you were sitting here in a hospital bed, staring up at the medical team as we whirled in and out of your room. Staring up at me as I drew blood from your central line each morning.

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Here’s the Thing

Martin Kohn January 4, 2013 No Comments

Martin Kohn

There are certain days
when death is just
not appropriate

When the mock orange blossoms
scent through the window
next to your sleeping son

When your wife stands naked
at the top
of the stairs

When the day stretches inside out
and the city vibrates in doo wop
riffs and arpeggios

When the scraps of paper
each containing a random word
fall to the floor
and assemble themselves
into the sonnet
you could never write–
even if your life depended
on it

About the poet:

Martin Kohn is director of the medical humanities program at the Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Ethics, Humanities and Spiritual Care, and an associate professor of medicine at Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine. With Carol Donley he co-founded

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Memento Mori

Craig W. Steele December 14, 2012 No Comments

Craig W. Steele

Quo Vadis Nursing Home haunts the east side of Erie Street,

squatting opposite Roselawn Cemetery, whose wrought-iron gates

gape tauntingly wide and welcoming. Today will soon be buried:

three wizened men sit rocking, speechless, on the front porch,

yearning for the shadowed marble and granite headstones,

no longer afraid of death, only of dying–suspended

between fear and need, stoically awaiting

the next busload of grade-schoolers determined

to brighten their deep-shadowed days.

Editor’s Note: Memento mori is a Latin phrase translated as “remember your mortality,” “remember you must die” or “remember you will die” [from Wikipedia].

About the poet:

Craig W. Steele is a writer and university biologist whose creative musings occur in the suburban countryside of northwestern Pennsylvania, where he

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Code Blue

Stephen W. Leslie November 30, 2012 3 Comments

Stephen W. Leslie

I was startled awake at 3:40 am by a loudspeaker blaring “Code Blue…Code Blue.”

As the hospital’s newly hired chaplain intern, I’d been sleeping in the overnight room. Stumbling out of bed and groggily changing out of my pajamas, I made sure to put on my hospital badge.

I made my way to the hospital’s “Z” building, where the ICU was located, and took the elevator to the fourth floor. The elevator opened onto a row of doorways, each decorated with a red warning sign: “Stop! Do Not Enter. Authorized Staff Only.”

I picked one and went through.

I’d guessed right: At the far end of a hallway, a group of gowned nurses swarmed around a woman lying in a hospital bed,

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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

Tag: death and dying

Dying Woman

One Last Sale

We Were Both New That Day

The Pronouncement

On the Road

What to Say When You’re Terminal

Cross-Examination

Palliative Care

Note to My Patient

Here’s the Thing

Memento Mori

Code Blue

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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

Tag: death and dying

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