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Nothing to Hide

Kevin Dorsey November 16, 2012 No Comments

About thirty years ago, after I’d completed my internal medicine residency and a rheumatology fellowship, my wife and I moved with our three-year-old son to my wife’s hometown.

There I joined a multispecialty group practice as the second rheumatologist. Over time, the plan was for me to build a rheumatology practice, but while that was happening I took on all kinds of patients, both primary-care and intensive-care. I felt very comfortable doing general internal medicine, and I also liked the intensity of ICU work.

Telling Nick

Marianne Lonsdale September 14, 2012 No Comments

Marianne Lonsdale

“What’s going to happen to Catie when she grows up?”

I was driving with my son, Nick, to the store when he asked this about his fifteen-year-old cousin, Catie. Nick, age eight, had just spent his spring break at Catie’s home. Blind, she was now losing her ability to talk, but she always recognized Nick’s voice. She adored having him by her side; whenever Nick walked into the room, her face lit up, and she raised her arms for hugs. She was the closest Nick was going to get to having a sibling.

“Will she get a job?” he piped up from the backseat. “Or will someone

Remembering John

Hilton Koppe August 17, 2012 No Comments

Hilton Koppe

I remember you the day we met. It was five years ago. I was terrified. You seemed relaxed and at peace. I’d been invited to join the Lennox Head Club, in the town where I live and work; this over-thirty-five match was the first game of soccer I’d played in twenty-five years. I was the oldest on the team. You were the youngest. For you it was just the start of another season, your loping, languid style belying your skill and your speed.

I remember you sitting next to me in my car on the long drive home from a game at Nimbin. You telling me about

July Intern–Taking Off My New White Coat

Heustein Sy July 6, 2012 1 Comment

Heustein Sy

I became a doctor of internal medicine in my home country, the Philippines, in 2005. The following year, I immigrated to the United States. In order to practice medicine here, I must complete one more journey–a three-year medical residency in the U.S.

My first week at the hospital has been a hectic blur–one task right after another. I’ve been existing on minimal amounts of sleep, food and social contact and maximum amounts of coffee.

Inside my head, though, this week has also been all about me. How lucky I was to have been picked for this coveted residency in this highly regarded hospital! How can I regain my rusty diagnostic skills? How do I look in my new white lab coat?

Rushing here and

In Line at the Hospital Coffee Stand

Tabor Flickinger June 8, 2012 No Comments

Tabor Flickinger

At the coffee stand as always getting tea,
so always that the ladies see my weary face
and start the water steaming without words.

I hover there with others waiting think through labs to check
imaging to glance at does he have pneumonia or pulmonary edema
has social work found her a nursing home will his family want a feeding
tube despite his end-stage dementia did I order cytology on that peritoneal
fluid when will I next see the sun it’s so

“Oh, did you take care of him before? He’s dead.”

unnatural in here fluorescent
now where was I peritoneal fluid hey I wonder who is dead

“Yes, I heard. We all had him at some point.
He was in the hospital

Catching Chickens

Daniel Klawitter April 27, 2012 No Comments

Daniel Klawitter

Morphine doesn’t do much for dementia.

I know this because my grandmother

was trying to catch an imaginary chicken

on her deathbed.

Wanting to calm her fevered thrashing,

my sister cleverly said: “It’s okay grandma.

I caught the chicken for you.

You can rest now.”

But my grandmother’s faded blue eyes

suddenly sprang wide open, and fixing my surprised

sister with a stern and lucid glare, declared:

“No you did NOT!”

And I’m still uncertain which came first:

our nervous laughter or the shock of her clarity,

so unexpected, we almost died.

I guess we all have to catch our own chickens,

before we cross the road and reach that other side.

About the poet:

Daniel Klawitter is an ordained deacon in the

Out of This World

Katelyn Mohrbacher March 30, 2012 No Comments

Katelyn Mohrbacher

When I met Jasper, I was a third-year medical student doing a nine-month rural clerkship, and he was an eighty-year-old man in a coma.

Family members surrounded Jasper–a tall, broad-shouldered man–as he lay in the hospital bed. His wife, Esther, a petite, lively woman also in her eighties, stood by his head, grasping the bed rail. At the foot of the bed stood their son, a middle-aged man with a baseball cap on his head, his hands fisted in his pockets. Flanking the bed were his sisters (both nurses), one with curly hair and a baggy sweatshirt, the other slim and well-groomed. A warm summer breeze wafted through the room, bringing the scent of fresh-cut grass.

Jasper had been admitted two days

Sick and Tired

Paul Rousseau January 20, 2012 No Comments

Paul Rousseau

“You told me you’re tired–tired of all the transfusions, and tired of being sick. Do you want to stop all the transfusions, Nancy?” I asked the woman lying in the hospital bed.

She was silent. Her husband of nineteen years, sitting nearby, was silent as well.

“What are you thinking, Nancy, can you tell me?” I asked.

Nancy, forty-eight, was suffering from chronic muscle inflammation, severe lung disease, pneumonia and–most severely–from terminal myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), a blood and bone-marrow disease for which she had to receive transfusions of platelets and red blood cells every other day.

Fed up with the transfusions, she’d asked to speak with the

Heroic Measures

Gil Beall December 30, 2011 No Comments

Gil Beall

“Doctor! Doctor! He’s stopped breathing!” the stout woman shouted, clutching at my white coat.

It was 1953, and I was a first-year resident responsible that night for the patients on the medical ward–including those in the four-bed room the woman pushed me into.

There I saw a melee taking place around a seventy-year-old man with chronic lung disease.

The man had been examined and admitted that evening by my colleague, who’d given me what little information he had before leaving for the night.

The man had been too absorbed in his breathing to talk much. We’d hooked him up to an oxygen tank and started an intravenous infusion of the bronchodilator aminophylline, which brought about modest improvement. We couldn’t think of anything else

Goodbye From the ICU

Andrew R Carey September 16, 2011 No Comments

Andrew R Carey

I do not know this man. I have never met him. All I know about him are the words typed in his medical chart–and that, before the day is out, he will die.

I have never heard him speak. I probably couldn’t pick him out in a crowd. Today he looks like a water bed: yellow, warm and squishy.

I wonder if he ever pondered what his last days might be like. Surely he hadn’t thought that at age forty-five he’d succumb to the final stages of hepatitis C, a disease he probably never knew he had. He’s been in this Boston ICU for forty days,

Mom Journeys to the Other Side

William Bryan August 26, 2011 No Comments

William Bryan

Mom was not fully conscious when she crossed over, but I’m quite certain she was aware of both sides of the veil as she departed the realm of the living. This is a brief story of her dying.

After my dad died, more than twenty years ago, my mom moved from our family home to live with my brother, Jim, and his wife, Barb.

In retrospect, it was an act of supreme foresight, ensuring that she’d be able to stay in a family setting even if she became unable to care for herself at some point. She enjoyed many quality years with her four grandchildren and traveled with her family to Greece, Maui and Croatia, among other exotic places.

Mom’s travels came to

The Whole Story

Veneta Masson August 19, 2011 No Comments

Veneta Masson

After she died
there was talk of war
the stock market crashed
the cat didn’t eat for three days
her youngest came home from school in tears
her husband grew a beard.

I do not lie when I tell you these things
nor do I tell the whole story.

I do not say that her funeral day dawned bright
and unrepentant

or that all the sunflowers in the city
were gathered at her wake.

I do not mention the ruffled bride
also in white, waiting discreetly outside
the door of the chapel.

I do not tell how, at the gravesite
smiling children blew
soap bubbles over her casket

and how they were not buried with her
but were borne up and away,
carried

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

Nothing to Hide

Telling Nick

Remembering John

July Intern–Taking Off My New White Coat

In Line at the Hospital Coffee Stand

Catching Chickens

Out of This World

Sick and Tired

Heroic Measures

Goodbye From the ICU

Mom Journeys to the Other Side

The Whole Story

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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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