One day several decades ago, after morning rounds, Dr. Prescott slipped into the ER where I was the cardiac nurse. She did something a doctor would never do: She placed her leather medical bag on a stretcher instead of on the desk. Her eyes locked onto mine.
“I’m having a heart attack,” she said calmly.
A few years ago, a Chicago-area fertility clinic ran a series of radio ads at the same early hour each morning. For weeks, I woke to a woman’s energetic voice cutting through the fog of my semiconsciousness, announcing her gratitude to the center’s reproductive specialists. “Without them,” she proclaimed brightly, “my baby wouldn’t have my blue eyes and my husband’s wide smile.”
A few months ago my friend Phil gave me a newspaper clipping from the Sunday New York Times on body-focused repetitive behaviors, from nail-biting to hair-pulling to skin picking. I know he gave it to me because he wanted to help me with my own problem. He’s heard me express my frustration about it at the support group for faculty in our family-medicine residency.
It’s late on a Friday afternoon in the outpatient clinic where I’m a third-year psychiatry resident. I’m wrapping up my appointment with Jane, a thirty-five-year-old woman with a mild intellectual disability who comes every month to refill her antidepressant prescription.
“Have you been watching the court case on TV?” she whispers.
I stop what I’m doing and look at her.
“The case with the judge and the doctor,” she says.
I sit back in my chair and give her my full attention.
“I’ve been reading about it,” I say. “Why do you ask?”
She looks down at her hands. “It’s just so hard to watch.”
Jamie Sweigart ~
It was a sunny Sunday afternoon on my urban college campus. I’d been sitting on the grass outside a lecture hall where my premed classmates and I would study together on weekends. This particular weekend, I was alone. Campus was empty, except for a man with a backpack who occasionally passed by.
Finished with studying, I started walking down a deserted sidewalk back to my apartment, a few blocks away. On the way, I dialed my best friend from home, Laura, and we began chatting.
“Hang up the phone,” said a man’s voice behind me. I felt the cold blade of a knife against the side of my neck.
Joe Burns ~
“Did you have heart surgery?”
The shy seventeen-year-old girl’s question caught me completely off guard.
Her name was Sarah. Everything about her seemed perfectly organized–her long black braid falling ruler-straight between her shoulders, her folder with all of its documents sorted by date, her matching shoes and shirt, her entire wardrobe without a single wrinkle.
Her health was a bit less perfect. She’d been born with an atrial septal defect (ASD)–a hole in the wall separating the heart’s right and left chambers. Tomorrow she was to have an operation to repair the hole, so she’d come in today, accompanied by her parents and brother, to sign the presurgical consent forms.
Naderge Pierre ~
As a surgical resident nearing my final year of training, I loved to operate. Whenever I was on call in the trauma unit at our large urban teaching hospital in Washington, DC, I’d yearn for my pager to go off.
I was always tired, too–but for a surgical resident, fatigue is a given. Sleep and eat when you can, get your work done and operate like a madwoman: That was my life. It felt like a high-adrenaline thrill ride, and I was enjoying every swoop and turn.
I never expected that, while racing towards the final exhilarating peak of my training, I would become a patient myself.
Ironically, it happened right after the most memorable surgery of
Andrea Eisenberg ~
Many years ago, on a busy day in my obstetrics-and-gynecology office, one of my partner’s patients came in for “bleeding, early pregnancy.” Since my partner wasn’t in that day, I saw the woman, whose name was Sarah. After we’d talked a bit, I examined her and did an ultrasound. As I’d expected, she was having a miscarriage. Feeling sorry that Sarah had to hear it from me, rather than from her own doctor, I broke the sad news.
We discussed the options: Did she want to have a D&C, or let nature take its course?
“I’m not sure,” she said. “I need some time to decide.” I agreed that this was understandable and left the room so that she
As I drove home after seeing my CT scan, I thought about how I could avoid telling anyone my diagnosis. It would be easy, I figured. I would wait until I had written confirmation of what I had seen. A few days passed, and I was able to maintain the deception–I loved acting, and this was an easy role for me, as protector of my family.
When the radiology report arrived, I felt like I was reading a report about one of my patients: “…suggestive of malignancy,”  it said. I kept looking at the name and birthdate–yes, this was my report. Thus began my path down the rough road of lung cancer.
Carly Bergey
It’s called a missed miscarriage: You arrive, as I did, at the doctor for your first-ever pregnancy appointment, suffering from morning sickness and filled with joyful anticipation–only to learn that your body has not yet registered the death of your small embryo. Despite all of my doctor’s tinkering and double-checking, the ultrasound screen showed no movement. There was just the outline of a baby in me, quiet and still.
Hoping for a natural miscarriage, I told my coworkers what had happened, but asked that we not discuss it at work.
Day after day, I went to the Denver office where I worked as a speech pathologist, carrying my baby deep inside me, like a single stitch woven within fold after fold of
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