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Tag: doctor-patient communication
Me Too
Frozan Walyzada
October 12, 2018
9 Comments
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.”
Right Coat Ceremony
Shadi Ahmadmehrabi
August 31, 2018
11 Comments
Shadi Ahmadmehrabi ~
It was my first day of orientation at medical school. In a hallway stood a coat rack overflowing with white garments. I set down my accumulated papers, reached for a hanger and, for the first time ever, shrugged first one arm and then the other into a white coat.
It was too large, but I had no other options. The unisex coats ran from XXS to XXL, but the smallest had all been claimed.
As I clumsily buttoned my coat on the right (women’s coats button on the left), I couldn’t help seeing this as a physical reminder that, as my mentors had warned, medicine continues to be male-dominated, and that I’d need to pick my battles.
My Immigrant Patients
Joanna Sharpless
July 27, 2018
12 Comments
Joanna Sharpless ~
In the living room of the house where I grew up hangs a framed copy of a seventeenth-century map of Pennsylvania. The land is divided into tiny plots, each painstakingly labeled with a family name.
When I was little, I’d stand in front of the map and search for the little squares labeled “Sharples”–the original version of my last name. I’d imagine my distant ancestors, John and Jane Sharples and their seven children, dressed in bonnets and breeches as they sailed across the Atlantic in 1682. As Quakers, they’d purchased land from William Penn and had fled religious persecution in their home country, England.
To a young girl, their immigration story sounded romantic; but as I grew older, I
Top of the Hill
Erika D. Walker
June 22, 2018
4 Comments
Erika Walker ~
“It’s as if you’re at the top of a hill,”
the doctor said. My father listened
from his hospital bed, a plastic tube
fed him breath he could no longer take
for himself. “Each time you get sick,”
the doctor said, “you roll a little farther
down the hill.” His young face shone
above his white coat. I remember rolling
down green hills when I was young,
playing in the park where my father
had played as a child. I laughed, loved
the bump and thrill, the sweet smell
A Good Cry
Colette Charles
June 15, 2018
20 Comments
I was a second-year resident, doing a twenty-four-hour shift on maternity care. I’d spent some arduous nights on call with my attending physician, Dr. Campbell; now we sat at the nursing station, joking about what this one might bring.
Cushioning the Fall
Meghan G. Liroff
April 27, 2018
14 Comments
Meghan G. Liroff ~
Angela Harris has been here in the hospital for six hours, awaiting the results of her CAT scan. I won’t take responsibility for all of that wait time: complicated CAT scans and labs do take a significant amount of time to perform. But she didn’t need to wait the last hour.
She was waiting on me–her emergency physician–because I needed to confirm her cancer diagnosis with radiology, arrange some oncology follow-up…and find the most appropriate phraseology for “You have stage IV cancer, but you don’t meet admission criteria.”
A Tingling Sensation
Mitch Kaminski
March 23, 2018
10 Comments
Mitch Kaminski ~
It had been a hectic day in the urgent-care clinic of my large family practice, and I was starting to worry about the time: My last two patients had put me thirty minutes behind.
I felt relieved when I saw the note for the next patient: “Seventy-four-year-old female with UTI.”
A urinary-tract infection! This should be quick and uncomplicated….
I walked into the room to find a well-dressed older woman seated on the exam table. I had just enough time to wonder fleetingly, Why do some patients decide to wait on the exam table while others stay seated in the chair nearby? Then I turned my full attention to the woman before me.
A Series of Unfortunate Events
Holland M. Kaplan
February 23, 2018
11 Comments
Holland M. Kaplan ~
I’m sitting in the ICU team room, staring at the computer, trying to look like I’m writing a note. But my head is pounding.
As an internal-medicine resident doing my first month of residency, I’ve found the ICU of the bustling county hospital a jarring place to start my training. Although I’d anticipated the clinical challenge of caring for very ill ICU patients, I was unprepared for the emotional burden of having to deliver devastating, life-altering news to them and to their family members.
Faint yells emerge from Room 7. They have an almost rhythmic quality: “Ahhh!”…(three seconds)…”Ahhh!”…(three seconds)…”Ahhh!”
It’s Ms. Burton. I’ve just gotten back from checking on her, but I plod back again.
Too Close for Comfort
Andrea Eisenberg
September 29, 2017
6 Comments
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
Cat and Mouse
Kristen Lee
September 15, 2017
7 Comments
Kristen Lee ~
On TV shows, therapists decorate their rooms with leather lounge chairs, throw pillows and organza curtains that let in the light.
But Dr. Hassan’s office is in the clinic basement. The fluorescent lighting is sterile. She has a gray metal desk–I think every doctor I’ve shadowed as a medical student has had that same desk.
But I’m not here as a student.
I’ve been anticipating this appointment for a month. In March, I started to take an online physiology exam for school, but instead spent twenty minutes staring motionless at the computer screen. I eventually input the answers and passed the test, but I’d stopped caring.
A week later, I had a panic attack while riding the
Saving Private Ryan
Gregory Rutecki
June 2, 2017
21 Comments
Gregory Rutecki
The late Eighties was the worst of times in medical education–the era when doctors in training worked a virtually unlimited number of hours each week. This unceasing and inhumane workload led residents, understandably, to view patients purely as collections of physical ailments.
Back then, I was an attending physician at a community teaching hospital. One day, as usual, I was preparing to make morning rounds and, simultaneously, to do my best to teach my team of internal-medicine residents.
Fourteen patients awaited us, every one of them quite sick. As my team and I proceeded from one bedside to the next, struggling to cram the patient interviews into ever-dwindling snippets of time, I felt a familiar sense of growing pressure; it
