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Clean. Dry. Intact.

Rebecca Haddad January 17, 2025 11 Comments

The bus is crowded today, and January sleet splashes against the windows. The damp of each of us thickens the air. I breathe in a miasma of germs and others’ breath. My scarf wets my face as the snow melts.

An eternity goes by before we reach the downtown stop. From here, I’ll take one more bus to get to the hospital where I work as a physician assistant on a team that treats infections involving blood vessels and the heart. I’m huddled an appropriate distance from the other commuters, my back to the wind.

Amor Fati

Joe Amaral November 29, 2024 1 Comment

Fortunate to have a heavy coat
and camp pants in the nightlong cold,
we find you face down in a field

rewarming like a lizard
near dead of an overdose—
leaves of grass imprinted
on your body catatonic,

eyes swollen from allergens.
All you can do is drool, mutter,
hallucinate and punch the sky.

A Child Is Born

Rachel Fleishman December 4, 2020 5 Comments

The miracle was that this baby had lived at all. His mother called 911 while in labor, with heroin easing her pain and numbing her conscience. The paramedics arrived at the empty warehouse where she’d been living. She delivered her newborn son in a toilet. The paramedics scooped him out, cut his umbilical cord with her razor blade and brought mother and son to our hospital.

The fact that all this took place should be remarkable.

Flashback

Rachel Mallalieu November 20, 2020 10 Comments

I notice the name on the waiting room
tab; it’s not a remarkable name,
but one I remember
from elementary school

Living-Room Code

Utsha Khatri May 1, 2020 5 Comments

It was a cold Friday morning, and my day started slow. I was a third-year emergency-medicine resident in West Philadelphia and was doing my EMS rotation.

I rode with the EMS lieutenant, who told me, “My job is to assist the medics with the bad stuff.” This, he explained, usually meant codes (cardiac arrests) and fires.

Then we got the first call and zipped through the city, lights and sirens blaring.

Detachedly, I wondered what type of cardiac arrest awaited us. When we walked into the apartment building and saw a twenty-three-year-old woman in the doorway, her face distraught and fearful, I knew.

The apartment was warm, well furnished and cozy. Firemen, who’d arrived on the scene first, knelt on the blue-carpeted floor to perform

Hooked

John Barber April 26, 2019 2 Comments

John Barber ~

I walked into the room of a dying man. This phrase might conjure up the image of a frail, white-haired patient peacefully nearing the end of life. Alex, however, was thirty–just two years older than me.

I was a third-year medical student doing a rotation in the ICU. This first encounter was sadly inglorious: As my team entered Alex’s room, the police officer who’d been guarding him walked out, leaving Alex handcuffed to the bed.

Alex looked like a ghost, his cheeks sunken and lifeless. A heart infection caused by his IV drug use was spewing dangerous bacteria through his bloodstream, infecting his lungs and spine. When not sedated, he was delirious, eyes staring wildly between wasted temples.

Cracked Up

Carlos Downell July 6, 2018 12 Comments

Carlos Downell ~

They say that to write well, you should write about what you know. I’m a homeless drug addict. This essay is not about me, although I’ll figure in it. It’s about drug abuse among the homeless, a subject I’m very well acquainted with.

I have a dual diagnosis–substance-abuse issues and psychiatric dysfunction. Double trouble. If I can’t get meth, I’ll smoke crack, and if I can’t get crack, I’ll smoke pot or take pills or whatever I can get–anything but inhalants. I’m what’s known as a polysubstance abuser. (Most addicts are.)

I’m in recovery. Sounds like I should be in a hospital bed, and perhaps I should–but I continue to function. I abide, I persevere and I survive: It’s

A Stranger Comes to Town

Syed M. Ahmed January 19, 2018 21 Comments

Syed M. Ahmed ~

Twenty-five years ago, having completed my family-medicine residency, I left Houston to start a two-year stint practicing in a remote village of fewer than 2,000 souls in the Appalachian Mountains of Ohio.

The day I arrived at my new workplace (a two-person practice in the only clinic for fifty miles), my new colleague Dr. Jones told me that she was leaving the next day on a two-week vacation.

Hearing this, I felt anxious, to say the least. I’d expected her to take time off, but so soon? Also, not only were this Appalachian town and its folks completely unknown to me, and vice-versa, but I was the first Asian physician to come to those parts.

If Only

Beatrice Leverett January 20, 2017 5 Comments

Beatrice Leverett

When I first met Jason, I was a third-year medical student halfway through my psychiatry rotation, and he was a newly admitted patient halfway through a nasty comedown from crystal meth.

He sat slumped in his chair, scowling, his face hidden by a baseball cap and black hooded sweatshirt, growling responses to my interview questions.

“Why do I have to do this? I hate this crap. I’ve answered these bullshit questions a million times. I’ve been in the psych ward a million times, and it’s never done anything for me.”

Reading his records, I realized that “a million times” wasn’t such an exaggeration. At only twenty-five, he’d been admitted to most of the local psychiatric hospitals. For several years,

Rough Start

Jutta Braun July 15, 2016 2 Comments

Approaching the hospital bassinet, I glimpse his hair first–long, carrot-colored fuzz sticking out in all directions from his pink, bowling-ball scalp. A chubby, scrunched face comes into view next, cherry-red lips forming a Cheerio and one eyelid wavering just enough to reveal a soft blue puddle beneath it.

Gingerly, I slide my hands under his sausage-like arms, my fingers cradling the doughy curves of his tiny neck, caressing the orange-yellow cornsilk on his occiput. Slowly, I lift him from the sterile white mattress he’s called home for the month since his exit from the womb, since his insurmountable hurdles began.

Confessions of a 75-Year-Old Drug Addict

Arlene Silverman January 22, 2010 2 Comments

Arlene Silverman

The physician, a slim, young man with a shaved head and intense, dark eyes, reaches out to shake hands. I fumble to extend one hand while the other clutches a questionnaire that I haven’t finished filling out.

“That’s okay,” Dr. Gordon says. “You can finish later.”

He can tell that I’m nervous, but seems to understand. He knows that I’ve had to sign in at a window surrounded by other patients, many younger than my own children. Some of them look dazed; others have dozed off. Still others, alert, look as if they’d just come from their job at the bank.

Me? I walk with a cane. My clothes have been carefully chosen to look presentable. I’ve come

The Emaciated Infant

Paula Lyons September 11, 2009 No Comments

Paula Lyons

The police had been called to the house by a neighbor who said she heard children crying and hadn’t seen the mother in two days. It was the middle of a night in July, and the children’s wails would have traveled through the project windows left open to catch cooling breezes.

Paramedics provided transport to the hospital, but the normally cynical and well-defended police were so outraged that they also came to the ER, where I was the resident on call.

The police came to find and punish those who had neglected this waif, but I also sensed that, despite their tough exteriors, they came also to vent their impotent rage and to seek reassurance that this tiny, dirty, appealing thing

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: drug addiction

Clean. Dry. Intact.

Amor Fati

A Child Is Born

Flashback

Living-Room Code

Hooked

Cracked Up

A Stranger Comes to Town

If Only

Rough Start

Confessions of a 75-Year-Old Drug Addict

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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: drug addiction

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