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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.

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.

No Red Lights

Loreen Herwaldt October 26, 2012 No Comments

Loreen Herwaldt

As far back as I can remember, I’ve deliberately spent my life on the high road. I was the seventh-grader who was told by adults that she was very serious. I was the college student who majored in chemistry because it was the strongest premed major. I became a doctor.

Before becoming a doctor, I imagined that I would be the epitome of compassion. I envisioned pausing for a moment before I saw each patient to pray for that person and to ask for wisdom. During my last two years of medical school, I enjoyed hanging out with my patients, just listening to their stories. I

Father and Sons

Kathleen Crowley September 28, 2012 No Comments

Kathleen Crowley

It was early November–the sky a sharp, deep blue that only comes at that time of year–and my primary-care clinic in the heart of the city was booked full with bronchitis and early flu. The TV in the corner was tuned to CNN. Children bounced around in boredom, chatting away in an assortment of languages–Haitian and Portuguese creole, Spanish, English.

My last patient of the morning was Jack, a man I’d been seeing for the past few years. He was a middle-aged guy–almost the same age as I was, in fact. I found him sitting quietly in the examining room, reading glasses on and newspaper in hand, wearing a jacket with his employer’s logo on the front.

Unlike most of the people in

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

Mother And Son

Adnan Hussain May 11, 2012 No Comments

Adnan Hussain

I judge. Even though I’m not supposed to, even though I try my best to stop myself, I still judge. Fundamentally, I guess, I’m a creature of habit, caught up in an endless current of seemingly instinctive behaviors. As a first-year medical resident, I sometimes feel acutely aware of this in my dealings with patients.

I stand at the bedside of Sharon Weathers, an unassuming woman in her mid-thirties for whom I’ve been caring over the past few days. She was admitted with excruciating abdominal pain that has proven resistant to our attempts at pain management. Each morning, I visit her to ask, “How did you sleep? On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your pain?” And each morning,

Stepping Into Power, Shedding Your White Coat: Donald Berwick’s Graduation Address

Donald Berwick May 4, 2012 2 Comments

Donald Berwick

Editor’s Note: Donald Berwick, recent Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in the Obama Administration, and a founder of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, gave this speech at his daughter’s graduation from Yale Medical School on May 24, 2010.

Dean Alpern, Faculty, Families, Friends and Honored Graduates…

I don’t have words enough to express my gratitude for the chance to speak with you on your special day. It would be a pleasure and honor at any graduation ceremony. But, I have to tell you, to be up here in this role in the presence of my own daughter on the day that she becomes a doctor is a joy I wouldn’t dare have dreamed up. I hope that each of

Common Thread

Peter de Schweinitz March 9, 2012 No Comments

Peter de Schweinitz

One sunny afternoon during my fourth year of medical school, I spent a day assisting a New Yorker turned rural Southern podiatrist. As we whittled dead skin, checked pulses and scheduled minor procedures, an arrogant question formed in my mind: Why did you choose the feet instead of something more impressive, like the heart?

Maybe he read my mind. Later, seeing me off to my car, he said, “I know that you medical doctors could do my job. I’m here so that you can do more important things.”

At the time, I didn’t know whether to pity his lack of aspiration or admire his humility. But a

The Silent Treatment

Frances Smalkowski March 2, 2012 1 Comment

Frances Smalkowski

Last year, while enjoying a two-week tour of the cultural capitals of China, I was amazed by how at home I felt. Searching my memory for the reasons behind this unexpected state of mind, I suddenly remembered Mr. Loy.

We met more than forty years ago. I was in my third year as a nursing student, doing a semester-long rotation in a large psychiatric hospital. Each student was assigned a patient for the semester, and Mr. Loy was mine.

We were expected to forge a therapeutic relationship with our patients. This was a tall order; most of our patients were diagnosed with some form of persistent schizophrenia, and few spoke in any coherent fashion, if they spoke at all.

Mr. Loy was no

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

Natural Selection

Jeremy Shatan December 9, 2011 1 Comment

Jeremy Shatan

By the time my wife and I reached Hospital B’s exam room, early in the afternoon, we’d already put in a very long day.

Across the room, which was no bigger than a galley kitchen, stood three doctors. One–I’ll call him the Chief–was the bearded, bushy-maned head of the pediatric oncology program. His explosion of salt-and-pepper hair made a startling contrast to his posh British accent. With him were Dr. Transplant, a small, kind-faced woman who specialized in bone-marrow and stem-cell transplants, and Dr. Nice, a genial young pediatrician with a Midwestern accent.

We were there with our fourteen-month-old son, Jacob. A week earlier, he’d had brain

The End of Nice

Rosalind Kaplan September 23, 2011 No Comments

“Mouse bite, one year ago” read the Chief Complaint entry on the chart I picked up from the “nonurgent” pile.

I was a second-year medical resident, on an eight-week stint in the Temple University Hospital emergency room. It was 3:50 am, the beginning of the end of the night shift. All hell could still break loose before my shift ended, but for now we were in a lull, and the less serious cases got our attention.

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: doctor-patient relationship

Note to My Patient

Nothing to Hide

No Red Lights

Father and Sons

July Intern–Taking Off My New White Coat

Mother And Son

Stepping Into Power, Shedding Your White Coat: Donald Berwick’s Graduation Address

Common Thread

The Silent Treatment

Sick and Tired

Natural Selection

The End of Nice

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fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: doctor-patient relationship

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