Finding a Way Home
Erin Imler
Mementos and Memories
Paul Rousseau
Delores sits tilted to the right in a worn wheelchair, a curtain separating her from a sleeping roommate.Â
She is wearing a blue blouse stained with something orange, perhaps Jell-O, and white pants and white socks. A worn gold wedding band adorns the fourth finger of her left hand. Her hair is a shiny gray, perfectly coiffed, and her face is etched with deep wrinkles, a testament to eighty-nine years of life.Â
A tiny bedside shelf displays two faded black-and-white photos from the 1930s or ’40s: one is of Delores in her twenties, a demure smile on her face; the other shows Delores with a young man
Just This Once
Majid Khan
It’s a rainy Thursday evening in our small inner-city practice. Today is the receptionist’s birthday, and I’ve been cordially invited to attend a small party prepared by her coworkers.
As I descend the green carpeted steps to the lounge, my aching muscles remind me about the torture session (otherwise known as “boxercise”) that I attended last night in my ongoing effort to get fit and control my weight. I still feel slightly resentful of Robert, the trainer; when he caught me slacking off during sit-ups, he embarrassed me in front of the class by making me repeat them.
Good job I didn’t tell him about those two
An Apology
Jordan Grumet
I’m sorry, Mrs. Lewis, for not making it to the hospital to see you yesterday….
Yesterday was one of those days when I felt like I could never catch up. My wife was going downtown for work, and we had to get up early. While she prepared, I helped my two-year-old son get dressed. We walked my wife to the train, then waited for the nanny. She was running late: I finally made it out of the house by 7:20, ten minutes before a meeting at the office. Since I didn’t have any patients in the hospital–or so I thought–I could go directly.
Past Medical History
Donald Stewart
Tryst With The Microscope
Reeta Mani
“So what kind of doctor are you?” asks my new neighbor, peering curiously at the MD degree on my visiting card.
“I’m a microbiologist,” I tell her. “I work in the lab and help clinicians to diagnose infectious diseases.”
Her questioning look fades. “So you don’t see patients?”
“No,” I answer. “I don’t have to interact closely with patients, except in a few cases.”
She reflects for a moment, then says, “It’s good in a way. You can help them, but you don’t have to witness their pain and suffering up close.”
I agree. In fact, that was one of the biggest reasons why I decided to specialize in microbiology. (In India, after graduating from medical school you can go straight into a
The Ancients Had It Right
Stanley H. Schuman
In Aramaic scripture*, and Aboriginal Dreamtime.
How else could animal life begin
Except by Divine Breath, oxygen-enriched?
How ingenious! Only two atoms: O2,
Ideal for hemoglobin, mitochondria,Â
Neurotransmitters, ideal for fight or flight, for vocalizing,Â
For clever humans to shape tools, split atoms,Â
Compose opera, sow seeds, harvest grain.
Consider my distress, in my just-opened pediatric office.Â
Stumped by Angela, a three-year-old
So panicked by my white coat, no way to examine her.
Screaming, clutching Mother, she knew and I knewÂ
This wasn’t university-hospital, with back-up nurses.
Instead, it was one-on-one,Â
Advantage Angela.
Desperate, I felt for a stray balloon in myÂ
Pants pocket (from my own child’s birthday).
Putting it to my lips, I strained to inflate the stubborn thing.
Instantly,
Things That Matter
Paul Gross
For me, the best part of being a doctor, and the biggest privilege, is getting to talk with people about things that matter.
“You look sad today,” I say to a patient I’m seeing for the first time–a thirty-eight-year-old woman with a headache. In response, her lower lip starts to tremble, and she wipes an eye.
As I reach for the box of tissues and hand it to her, I know that whatever has caused her tears will be more important than her presenting symptom.
A forty-five-year-old man comes in wanting help sustaining erections. When I ask for a few details, it turns out he’s having sex every single day of the week, and he’s finding it a challenge to maintain an erection
Bruised
Eileen M.K. Bobek
The year after I finished my emergency medicine residency, I had all four of my wisdom teeth pulled.Â
Afterwards, I looked as if I had taken several punches to my face. My jaw was swollen, my skin a cornucopia of muddied blues, purples, greens, yellows and reds. If people didn’t know better, I told my husband with a laugh, they might think that I’d been beaten.Â
It took weeks for the swelling and discoloration to resolve. I went about my life, aware of both my face and people’s responses to it. Their pitying, uncomfortable, sometimes disgusted expressions told me what they were thinking: I was being abused. But nobody ever asked me how I was, how it had happened or even if
Postmortem
Sandy Brown
Coming out of my exam room on a Monday morning, I saw two overweight police officers standing in my waiting room. From past experience, I knew that they were there to tell me that one of my patients had died and to collect information for the coroner’s report. Even as I geared up to hear the impending bad news, the doctor in me couldn’t help wondering how they’d passed their department physicals.
“Do I need to call a lawyer?” I joked, trying to guess which of my patients it could be.
“Michael Freund died on Saturday,” said Dalia, my office manager.
It was a shot to my gut. Mike was seventy-three years old, but one of my healthiest patients
Maman
Paul Gross
At a recent religious service I attended with Maman, my 87-year-old mother, I watched her fumbling attempts to find hymn number 123, “Spirit of Life,” in the hymnal. I held my book up, opened to the appropriate page, so that we both could sing from it.
She glanced up momentarily, tightened her lips, hunched forward and resumed turning pages, finally arriving at the song when the congregation was singing the second verse, which she needed help finding–what with her poor vision and the swirl of notes and words on the page.
As this ritual repeated itself, hymn after hymn, it occurred to me how much cozier it would be if my mother and I could share from the same hymnal.
The Resilient Heart
Paula Lyons
He was applying for a job on a refuse truck working for the City. This is a very good job for someone whose hiring prospects are otherwise limited. Excellent benefits, all state and federal holidays off, health insurance for oneself and one’s family, physical exercise in the fresh air. (All right, this was Camden, New Jersey, so exercise in some kind of air.) And one more plus: If the team is efficient and hardworking and get through their rounds by 11:30 am or noon, they can take the rest of the day off, yet get paid as if they’d worked the whole 5 am-to-1 pm shift.
I was the doctor doing his pre-placement physical exam–designed to determine if the potential employee has