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Thanksgiving 2023

Laura Fry November 22, 2024 15 Comments

It has been years, decades really, since I have watched television. I have the box, watch movies, but haven’t had cable ever. My two children were in first and second grade when I divorced their dad, and the house we moved into had no reception.

“Oh, well,” I told them, “no TV.” They were too little to grumble, but years later my daughter thanked me, saying, “We did so many other things.”

Now I find myself newly single and in transition for the winter, living in a rented house with—you guessed it—a TV with a full complement of channels and full reception.

From One Little Lady to Another

Nisha Narula November 15, 2024 6 Comments

Donna dropped her blood-thinner tablets on the floor prior to surgery.

“It’s a sign I shouldn’t be taking them,” she said.

Now, sometime later, it makes me smile to think of it; she’s recovered well from the surgery and has resumed her medications. I’d told her to stop taking them just prior to the surgery—a complex hernia repair—and to resume them the day after, but she’s the type of person who does what she wants, what she thinks is best.

Elderly Multigravida

Lisa Sieczkowski October 25, 2024 7 Comments

I had to drive across town for my appointments with the high-risk obstetrician. I had been referred to him by my normal-risk obstetrician due to my age (thirty-six the first time, and now again at thirty-nine) and my two previous miscarriages.

The waiting room was never crowded. It was dimly lit, with photographs of babies and children plastered across one wall.

Today, as at every visit, I studied the photos fiercely while waiting for my name to be called.

“Are You a Girl or a Boy?”

Marc D. Wager October 4, 2024 5 Comments

Ever since my primary-care pediatric group practice adopted electronic records, we’ve used them to give our patients pre-visit online questionnaires that screen for various things: tuberculosis, lead exposure, developmental issues, autism, drug and alcohol use, postpartum depression, food insecurity and so on.

I started off thinking that the questionnaires were intended to save precious visit time by asking patients about these subjects before the appointment. Then I realized that our practice bills the health-insurance companies for administering these questionnaires (and some pay quite well). More recently, I’ve realized that these surveys offered another benefit as well—perhaps the most valuable of all.

For my young patient Remi’s three-year checkup, his parents completed all the recommended pre-visit online screenings.

Beyond the EMR

Anthony P. Gulotta September 20, 2024 8 Comments

Squeak…Squeak…Squeak….

I stood against a wall in a narrow hallway to avoid blocking a meal cart passing through on its morning voyage. Inside this cart were a series of compartments, each containing a tray bearing a hospitalized patient’s breakfast. My attending physician stood beside me, inspecting a list of patients’ names as the cart rolled past.

Squeak…Squeak…Squeak….

“That’s a good case for a med student,” my attending declared, gesturing at a name on the paper. “Take this one.”

Going It Alone

Tafadzwa S. Kasambira September 17, 2024 7 Comments

Editor’s Note: This piece was a finalist in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”

Loneliness can creep up on you like a phantom, slipping its cold hand into yours and offering companionship that is both depressing and alluring—particularly when, looking around, you see nobody else whose face mirrors your own.

It was my first day of residency at a top pediatric program in Boston—a predominantly white program catering to a predominantly white patient population in a predominantly white city.

Scanning the room, I realized that, for the next three years, I would be the only Black person among some thirty-five residents.

Letter From the Dead

Ann F. Beach August 30, 2024 23 Comments

Gross Anatomy class is a rite of passage, and has been so for a few hundred years. Generations of first-year medical students have spent months dissecting cadavers and painstakingly learning the intricacies of human anatomy.

I well remember my first day of class—the overpowering smell of formaldehyde and the unnerving sight of a roomful of twenty-five dead people lying supine, their faces and genitals covered, on metal tables.

Assigned by the alphabet, four students to a cadaver, my peers and I (Fabert, Ferris, Flamm and Fleming—my maiden name) stood gingerly next to our cadaver, careful not to get too close. We shifted uneasily. Touching our cadaver (a woman) for the first time, even with gloves on, was disquieting.

Not Knowing

Kay White Drew August 23, 2024 11 Comments

A few days after I’d rotated off the adolescent ward at the university hospital where I was a second-year pediatric resident, I stopped in at Billy’s room to see how he was doing. He was pale, with a few fresh bruises below the sleeves of his hospital gown, but his big brown eyes brightened when he saw me.

“Where’ve you been?” he asked.

“She had to go to work on another ward,” his mom said, rubbing his forearm gently. “I told you that, remember?”

A Little Bit of Lagniappe

Alexandra Belardo-DeFelice August 7, 2024 6 Comments

Editor’s Note: This piece was a finalist in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”

Throughout my pediatrics clerkship as a third-year medical student, I resisted the urge to say “sha.”

“Sha,” as in “Sha baby,” “Oh sha,” or “Come here, sha.” “Sha,” a term of endearment, an instinctive utterance at the sight of something cute—for example, all of my patients in the newborn nursery. “Sha,” a word from Acadiana, a word that only people from Acadiana use.

Her Call Was Tougher Than Mine

Julie Miley Schlegel July 19, 2024 12 Comments

“Is he in pain?” Joshua’s mother asked, after I told her who I was. She had finally answered the phone after fifteen days of letting my calls go to voicemail.

“I don’t think so,” I answered. The truth was, at that point in my early career as a pediatric resident, I didn’t know whether he was in pain. “We’re giving him medicines to keep him comfortable.”

“Okay,” she said. I could hear young children laughing in the background. I knew from her obstetric records that she had five besides this newborn.

“Any questions?” I asked.

The Dreams That Bring Us Here

Heba Armoush July 12, 2024 14 Comments

It is a quiet Thursday evening in the fall of 2015 at the Dara Medical Center in Brooklyn, where I’m volunteering as a medical observer. The Center is almost empty. At the far end of the corridor, I see an elderly man wearing a black sweater and eyeglasses. His face is pale; his eyes and hands are creased and wrinkled.

“Where are you from?” he asks.

“I’m Palestinian,” I answer.

“Pakistan?” he replies incredulously.

Happiness Loves Company

Suyash Jha May 31, 2024 4 Comments

I remember the first time I saw the gates of the Missionaries of Charity home for the destitute and dying, on the outskirts of my hometown, Pune, in western India.

I must have been nine or ten. To my annoyance, my parents had woken me early that Sunday morning to go with them to visit the home and bring donations of clothes and other necessities.

“How much longer, Papa?” I kept asking as we drove.

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

Tag: doctor stories

Thanksgiving 2023

From One Little Lady to Another

Elderly Multigravida

“Are You a Girl or a Boy?”

Beyond the EMR

Going It Alone

Letter From the Dead

Not Knowing

A Little Bit of Lagniappe

Her Call Was Tougher Than Mine

The Dreams That Bring Us Here

Happiness Loves Company

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

Tag: doctor stories

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