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What We Carry

Sandra Miller June 21, 2013 No Comments

Sandra Miller

When I was an intern, we carried everything.
We carried manuals and little personal notebooks, frayed and torn,
crammed with tiny bits of wisdom passed on by a senior or attending.
Yet when a midnight patient rolled in with a myocardial infarction
we didn’t look anything up because there were only four drugs we could use:
morphine for the crushing pain,
nitroglycerin to flush open the vessels,
lidocaine for rebellious rhythms,
and furosemide for sluggish fluids.
I’m old.
We had nothing to block the betas or the calcium channels,
nothing to inhibit the ACEs,
no fancy clot-dissolvers,
just the patient and the strip.
Some made it, some didn’t.

The Pronouncement

Carl V. Tyler June 14, 2013 No Comments

Carl V. Tyler

I knew from last night’s house call that my patient Bessie’s time was near. All day long I’d felt the familiar churning inside, the sickly sweet combination of anticipated dread and anticipated relief. So when the phone rang while I was exercising at home, I wasn’t surprised. I quickly dropped the barbell weights to answer the call before it went to voice mail.

It was Bessie’s daughter, Susan.

Now We Are Five

Paul Gross April 26, 2013 No Comments

Paul Gross

“I’m glad that you’re the one calling me with this.”

John’s comment takes me aback. It’s an unexpected, almost tender, confession from a twenty-year-old young man whom I’ve called with some good news and some not-so-good news.

“The good news is that your HIV test is negative,” I tell him. “You do not have AIDS. But the not-so-good news is that you tested positive for chlamydia, another sexually transmitted infection.”

I want to give him a moment to let this sink in, but he jumps in anxiously: “Can you treat it?”

“Yes, we can treat it. It’s easy to treat. It’s curable.”

“And I’ll be okay?”

“Yes, you’ll be fine. Once we treat it, the infection will be gone.”

I hear the sigh

The Story of Pulse

Paul Gross March 27, 2013 No Comments

One Monday morning, a number of years ago, the administrators at the family health center where I used to work instituted a new and time-consuming procedure for registering patients. They did this in an attempt to satisfy the rules and requirements imposed by the many different insurance plans our center accepted.

There was just one problem: the administrators forgot to tell anyone what they’d done–not even the center’s medical director, who happened to be on vacation at the time.

As the clerical staff stumbled over a brand-new, complex set of protocols that day, a line of patients, mostly poor, snaked around the lobby, out the front door onto the sidewalk. Tempers grew short. A fight nearly broke out. We providers sat in the back twiddling

Hurricane Sandy: Two Tales of One City: Part 2

Alice Teich November 9, 2012 No Comments

Not Your Usual Halloween

Alice Teich

Hey Manisha,

Last night–Halloween–I went and volunteered at a shelter in a school basement/gymnasium in the Nineties on the Upper West Side.

There were more than 100 folks staying there, mostly evacuated from the Lower East Side. The shelter, run by the City, had some volunteers at the front desk, a few security people, a medical team that consisted of myself, one other doctor and a nurse (volunteers through the NYC Medical Reserve Corps–if you’re a provider, you can sign up online; it only takes fifteen minutes), and more than twenty awesome volunteers of all ages.

It was a mess.

Quite a few folks staying there

Hurricane Sandy: Two Tales of One City

Paul Lapis November 9, 2012 No Comments

Editor’s Note: Hurricane Sandy hit New York, Pulse‘s home, on Monday, October 29. Eleven days later, many parts of our area are still limping toward recovery. Today we bring you two stories, rather than the usual one, about the hurricane’s impact. The first is by a medical student who was suddenly thrust closer to his newly adopted city. The second is an e-mail written to a colleague by a family physician who volunteered time in a City shelter.

New York Welcomes You

Paul Lapis

Just three short months ago, I took my first steps into the medical world when I put on my white coat and began my first day as a student

Epiphany

George Saj April 20, 2012 No Comments

George Saj

It happened one wintry night in 1965. I was in my third year of medical school during a rotation on the pulmonary service.

My supervising intern had been busy all evening admitting a dozen people in various stages of respiratory distress; they were suffering from ailments ranging from flu to double pneumonia.

It was my job to collect each patient’s sputum and culture it on a Petri dish, which would take several days to grow out. I also prepared stained slides of each sample. We did this in hopes of being able to visually identify the offending bacteria, so that we could speedily administer the appropriate antibiotic.

This was painstaking work: the intern and I had to repeatedly re-check

Physician, Heal Thyself

Randy Rockney March 23, 2012 No Comments

Randy Rockney

After a long day’s work as a pediatrician at an academic medical center in Providence, RI, nothing says “relief” like a visit to my therapist. I don’t see him often, but he has helped me through many life transitions. I think we both agree with the Buddhist precept that the only constant in life is change.

One evening after work, a couple of years ago, I arrived early in the neighborhood of my therapist’s office. I was hungry, but there wasn’t time for a meal, so I stopped at a pharmacy to peruse the snack aisle. The smallest and cheapest option available, a bag of roasted pumpkin seeds, seemed perfect.

Escape to HuHot

Jennifer Frank November 11, 2011 No Comments

Jennifer Frank

Hunched, shriveled, pinched
Enclosed in the metal prison of the wheelchair
You long to be free, unencumbered
By the oxygen tube connecting you to life

Each visit with me brings worse news
Creatinine up, red cells down
Carbon dioxide rising, oxygen falling
You have a medication deficiency

Once you were adventurous
Living life on the edge
For your generation,
You defied expectation

Now you are ending like
Everyone Else.
Hospital-home-hospital-rehab
Home-hospital-nursing home
Death is next

Your passions now are distilled into
Shopping at Walmart
Lunch at HuHot Mongolian Grill
I have never been

While I recite the monotony
End-of-life care
Advise hospice
Encourage compliance
Lecture about smoking

Crafting My Own Safety Net

Nicola Holmes November 4, 2011 1 Comment

Nicola Holmes

As I guide my car through the evening traffic, I feel tears on my cheeks.

I am a doctor who plans ahead: I write out plans for my patients. This has led to my nickname, “Plan Doctor.”

Each of my consultations is carefully crafted in separate steps. The conclusion is laid out in my own neat copperplate handwriting on a plain white page. (My father taught me to write copperplate. For hours every evening I would copy stencils of words he’d written out. At the time I felt persecuted; now each day, as my writing flows, I marvel at his wisdom.)

Each plan leaves the room with

Finding a Way Home

Erin Imler October 28, 2011 No Comments

Erin Imler

Preparing to assemble my new bed, I open the wordless instruction manual. The first page shows a picture of a single stick-figure standing there, hands on hips, and sadly regarding a bungled, not-put-together bed; the next image is two happy-looking stick-figures standing with their arms around each others’ shoulders, looking at a successfully constructed bed.

Despite the warning, I’m determined to do this by myself. For almost four years, I’ve slept on my couch, preferring it to my twenty-year-old mattress. Now that I’m starting a new job in a new city, it’s finally time for a new bed.

Mementos and Memories

Paul Rousseau July 15, 2011 No Comments

Paul Rousseau

Delores sits tilted to the right in a worn wheelchair, a curtain separating her from a sleeping roommate.

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.

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

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Tag: doctor stories

What We Carry

The Pronouncement

Now We Are Five

The Story of Pulse

Hurricane Sandy: Two Tales of One City: Part 2

Hurricane Sandy: Two Tales of One City

Epiphany

Physician, Heal Thyself

Escape to HuHot

Crafting My Own Safety Net

Mementos and Memories

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