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A Conversation About Race, Fear and Connection

Paul Gross July 22, 2016 15 Comments

Paul Gross

In the wake of recent events, many speak about the need for conversations about race. In our country, the implications of race are a moral issue, a humanitarian issue, a justice issue and, yes, a medical issue. (One need only examine how racial categorization affects rates of death.) But what would this conversation about race look like?

Today, Pulse’s editor provides one offering. In August, we’ll invite all Pulse readers to join in with their stories, when Race will be the theme of More Voices.

I grew up in Stuyvesant Town, a middle-class housing development just north of Fourteenth Street on the east side of Manhattan. Built after World War II, Stuyvesant Town was a leafy and desirable place to live.

The Making of Me

Hilton Koppe June 14, 2016 No Comments

I was the new doc in a small country town. I wanted to be accepted. I wanted to do best for my new patients.

She was the town matriarch. She had multiple chronic illnesses. She had the power to make me or break me.

Icy Cold

Paul Gross June 1, 2016 No Comments

“Your hands are cold.”

I heard these words throughout my third year of medical school, the year during which we first touched patients on a routine basis.

My hands were cold. I was nervous; how could I not be? What a strange experience for me–asking strangers to disrobe, then touching their bare skin.

What Money Can Buy

Hind Almazeedi April 8, 2016 18 Comments

Hind Almazeedi

Arwa arrives late to the clinic. Her husband is parked outside waiting for her.

“You missed your last two appointments,” I say, checking her records. It’s been four months.

“I didn’t have a ride,” she shrugs.

Many of my patients live close to the primary-care center in Kuwait where I work as a family physician, but the desert heat makes it impossible to come here on foot. Two minutes under the sun can leave you delirious, and if you have asthma, the sudden dust storms are a constant threat. Without an air-conditioned car, you’re essentially homebound.

I know this, so I don’t argue with Arwa.

What’s Love Got To Do With It?

H. Lee Kagan April 1, 2016 6 Comments

H. Lee Kagan

My longtime patient Brenda let the top of her exam gown drop to her waist, stepped down off the exam table and turned to look at herself in the mirror. As I watched, she cupped her seventy-eight-year-old breasts in her palms and unceremoniously hoisted them up to where they’d probably resided when she was in her twenties.

“I’m thinking about having my boobs done,” she said. “My girlfriend had hers done, and she’s very happy with how they turned out. What do you think, doctor?”

As she spoke, her eyes remained on her reflection. Breasts held high, she made quarter turns to the right and left, then leaned back.

“I don’t like how they look now,” she said,

Tough Love

Maria Gervits March 18, 2016 9 Comments

Maria Gervits

I miss Alba. I don’t know why, but I do. She was the most challenging patient I’ve ever had. I dreaded seeing her in the office–and yet, somehow, she won me over.

Alba was fifty-nine, with short, silver hair, a deep, gravelly voice from decades of smoking, and an attitude. She had lung disease, heart disease, depression, arthritis and HIV. She also had a complicated social situation. She’d used cocaine and heroin until her husband had died of HIV. She’d then moved in with her elderly mother and cared for her until her mother died of a stroke. Now Alba lived in a shelter right around the corner from where her father had been shot years before.

The biggest joy

Ritual Healing

Joseph Fennelly October 16, 2015 16 Comments

Joseph Fennelly

In recent years the medical profession has witnessed a surge in burnout and depression among physicians and other health professionals. Efforts have been made to address this–for example, by offering Schwartz Center Rounds, in which caregivers openly and honestly discuss the social and emotional issues they face. Health professionals can also reduce stress through counseling, meditation or massage, or through practical steps such as cutting back on their working hours.

In the most traumatic cases–those marked by the death of the patient–physicians have yet another powerful source of comfort and emotional support. This support, offered by the patient’s family, comes within a context that allows the caregiver to accept it without forfeiting professionalism.

Denial

Kendra Peterson October 9, 2015 8 Comments

Kendra Peterson

July first Fellow,
a pager blares announcing
my initiating consult, a 29-year-old
(just my age)
malignant melanoma
and a first-time seizure
while receiving an infusion
of experimental treatment.

When I arrive
she’s already gotten
two milligrams of ativan
dilantin load is hanging
and I examine
a somnolent young woman
now coming ’round,
could be my friend, my sister, me,

Special Delivery

Deborah Pierce September 4, 2015 3 Comments

Deborah Pierce

I first met Marie five years ago. A petite, soft-spoken woman in her thirties, she was the patient of one of the residents whom I supervise at our community hospital. Marie worked in housekeeping for a large corporation; she and her husband, a bus driver, had a six-year-old son. Now she was twenty-six weeks (six months) pregnant with their second child.

Marie’s blood pressure was markedly elevated (168/120), she had fairly high amounts of protein in her urine, and her baby measured small on the ultrasound. These pointed to severe preeclampsia–a serious complication that can quickly worsen, leading to kidney damage, seizures or even death for mother and child, and that can only be cured by delivering the baby.

The

First Language

Carl V. Tyler August 28, 2015 5 Comments

Carl V. Tyler

In my clinic and in the nursing home
Every week I see it
That depthless hollow look behind the eyes
But this time it was your eyes
Sitting across the table
At a TGI Friday’s outside of DC.

And that all-too-familiar look to your face
Of knowing and not knowing
Of barely contained panic
Of quizzically furrowed brow
Of fear.

Lost was your rich and subtle language
The rapid-fire musical cadence
The effortless literary allusions
Of English teacher and poet.

Day of Reckoning

Suzanne Minor August 21, 2015 11 Comments

Suzanne Minor

Yesterday my friend Sophie asked me to accompany her to a Miami hospital intensive-care unit to see her older brother, Guillermo. He’d been admitted the previous night with seizures and cardiac arrhythmia.

Joined by my husband, we made our way to the ICU. When she saw Guillermo lying immobile, swollen and unresponsive, with a breathing tube in his mouth and other tubes snaking into his chest from IV poles, Sophie broke down sobbing.

Seeing her reaction, I felt a little ashamed at my own calm, although I knew it was hard-earned. During my years as a family doctor working in Miami-Dade County’s community clinics, I’d witnessed countless scenes like this one. Where Sophie saw a beloved brother utterly vulnerable and

Last Stand

E. Wesley Ely July 24, 2015 23 Comments

E. Wesley Ely

The first time I saw Jessa, she lay crumpled in the ICU bed, paralyzed, expressionless and unable to speak. A military veteran, she had fought in Desert Storm, but she now was facing a deadlier and more inexorable foe: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), aka Lou Gehrig’s disease.

This disease causes progressive loss of muscle control, and Jessa was unable to speak, eat or breathe on her own. Her only means of communicating was through small facial movements–opening and closing her eyes or mouth, raising her eyebrows.

A dozen people made up her ICU team: three interns, three residents, a pharmacist, a nurse, a respiratory therapist, a social worker, a hospital chaplain and myself–the lead physician, or intensivist.

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: doctor stories

A Conversation About Race, Fear and Connection

The Making of Me

Icy Cold

What Money Can Buy

What’s Love Got To Do With It?

Tough Love

Ritual Healing

Denial

Special Delivery

First Language

Day of Reckoning

Last Stand

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

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Tag: doctor stories

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