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Cross-Examination

Paul Rousseau March 22, 2013 No Comments

Paul Rousseau

“I want everything done. Please, Dr. Rousseau, do everything. We have two children–they can’t be without their father. Do you understand? Do what it takes to keep him alive!”

Angie, a petite woman with long blonde hair, fixes me with piercing blue eyes. Her husband, Joe, fifty-two, has scleroderma, an autoimmune disease. In its most devastating form, it hardens the skin and destroys the kidneys, heart and lungs.

Joe is dying of sepsis and multi-organ failure in my hospital’s intensive-care unit.

“Please, do whatever it takes to keep him alive,” Angie pleads.

Suddenly, I am thrust into the depths of grief. Not hers, mine. It happens just like that–no warning, no nothing, just a painful inner quivering and

Nineteen Steps

Priscilla Mainardi December 28, 2012 No Comments

Tuesday morning, eight o’clock, and I have seven things to do. Check vitals, change a dressing, get a patient out of bed, send another to the operating room. Review lab results, give medications, start a blood transfusion.

I have six patients, and they have an average of five morning medications each. I make three trips to the med room for supplies, two trips to the pantry for fresh water.

Memento Mori

Craig W. Steele December 14, 2012 No Comments

Craig W. Steele

Quo Vadis Nursing Home haunts the east side of Erie Street,

squatting opposite Roselawn Cemetery, whose wrought-iron gates

gape tauntingly wide and welcoming. Today will soon be buried:

three wizened men sit rocking, speechless, on the front porch,

yearning for the shadowed marble and granite headstones,

no longer afraid of death, only of dying–suspended

between fear and need, stoically awaiting

the next busload of grade-schoolers determined

to brighten their deep-shadowed days.

Editor’s Note: Memento mori is a Latin phrase translated as “remember your mortality,” “remember you must die” or “remember you will die” [from Wikipedia].

About the poet:

Craig W. Steele is a writer and university biologist whose creative musings occur in the suburban countryside of northwestern Pennsylvania, where he

The One She Calls Milk

Amy Haddad November 23, 2012 No Comments

Amy Haddad

Is for pain but has a longer name
she can’t pronounce. It’s for when he shakes.
She is not sure if the shakes
mean pain since these days
he often cannot say.

Earlier when he could say,
he would mimic the circle faces
on the pain chart the nurses held up to him.
He would try on expressions
until he found one that fit his pain.
He would set his lips into a thin straight line
or deeply furrow his brow. “That one.
That’s how it feels,” he’d say
with just a small note of pride for
getting it right.

Now getting it right is her job.

for the Ten Days

Madeleine Mysko November 2, 2012 No Comments

Madeleine Mysko

We say goodbye, her hand goes up (but not
in time to catch me), then the breach: I kiss
my mother on the cheek. Oops, I say,
you’d better wash your face. We laugh, of course–
that’s the better way to make it through
the chemotherapeutic calendar.
But it’s no joke. Her white cell count is low.
I see my mother back away from me.

I’m treacherous. I’ve not observed the Ten
Solemn Days of Abstinence. Oh what
to do but put a finger to the lips,
and teach the mouth never to kiss, never
to take a breath, or utter Mother, while
stepping lightly past your door, O Death.

About the poet:

Madeleine Mysko is a registered nurse and a graduate of The Writing

Beyond Reason

Kathy Speas September 7, 2012 No Comments

Kathy Speas

Visiting the dementia unit of a nursing home is never easy.

First off, you have to find your patient amid the assemblage of people–mostly women–seated in wheelchairs, recliners, wingbacks, sofas and assorted walkers, or wandering around.

Then, you must make yourself known to the person you’ve found. Here’s where the harder questions arise: How can I introduce myself and convey my role–a hospice chaplain–to someone who has outlasted language? Is my state of mind so calm and engaged that my very being will exude peace and generate trust? Am I totally present, or is my mind bouncing back and forth between tomorrow and yesterday? And just what does it mean, as a hospice chaplain, to provide spiritual support to someone at the end

Remembering John

Hilton Koppe August 17, 2012 No Comments

Hilton Koppe

I remember you the day we met. It was five years ago. I was terrified. You seemed relaxed and at peace. I’d been invited to join the Lennox Head Club, in the town where I live and work; this over-thirty-five match was the first game of soccer I’d played in twenty-five years. I was the oldest on the team. You were the youngest. For you it was just the start of another season, your loping, languid style belying your skill and your speed.

I remember you sitting next to me in my car on the long drive home from a game at Nimbin. You telling me about

What About Bob?

Joseph Fennelly June 22, 2012 No Comments

Joseph Fennelly

The time: early one morning, thirty years ago.

The place: my local hospital.

At this point, I have been an internist for twenty years. I’ve just entered the cardiac care unit, where my patient Bob, a ninety-five-year-old man with advanced senility, has been brought because he’s having chest pain.

As I step through the door, Bob codes. The young residents and staff swing into action, rushing the crash cart over to his bed.

Quickly, I jump between them and Bob.

“Don’t resuscitate him!” I shout.

Looking stunned, they eye me as I stand there with folded arms, making myself into a human shield.

Bob lies motionless, not

Cold Comfort

Mary T. Shannon June 15, 2012 No Comments

Mary T. Shannon

Leaning against the hospital bed’s cold metal rails, I gazed down at my husband lying flat on his back. Under the harsh fluorescent ceiling lights, his olive skin looked almost as pale as mine.

We’d been in the outpatient unit since 6:00 am for what was supposedly a simple procedure–a right-heart catheterization to assess the blood pressure in John’s pulmonary arteries. Now it was 3:00 in the afternoon.

Before we’d arrived that morning, John had seen the procedure as a chance to take a day off from the clinic where he practices internal medicine.

“I think I’ll go out this afternoon and hit a bucket of

Out of This World

Katelyn Mohrbacher March 30, 2012 No Comments

Katelyn Mohrbacher

When I met Jasper, I was a third-year medical student doing a nine-month rural clerkship, and he was an eighty-year-old man in a coma.

Family members surrounded Jasper–a tall, broad-shouldered man–as he lay in the hospital bed. His wife, Esther, a petite, lively woman also in her eighties, stood by his head, grasping the bed rail. At the foot of the bed stood their son, a middle-aged man with a baseball cap on his head, his hands fisted in his pockets. Flanking the bed were his sisters (both nurses), one with curly hair and a baggy sweatshirt, the other slim and well-groomed. A warm summer breeze wafted through the room, bringing the scent of fresh-cut grass.

Jasper had been admitted two days

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

Goodbye From the ICU

Andrew R Carey September 16, 2011 No Comments

Andrew R Carey

I do not know this man. I have never met him. All I know about him are the words typed in his medical chart–and that, before the day is out, he will die.

I have never heard him speak. I probably couldn’t pick him out in a crowd. Today he looks like a water bed: yellow, warm and squishy.

I wonder if he ever pondered what his last days might be like. Surely he hadn’t thought that at age forty-five he’d succumb to the final stages of hepatitis C, a disease he probably never knew he had. He’s been in this Boston ICU for forty days,

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: end of life

Cross-Examination

Nineteen Steps

Memento Mori

The One She Calls Milk

for the Ten Days

Beyond Reason

Remembering John

What About Bob?

Cold Comfort

Out of This World

Escape to HuHot

Goodbye From the ICU

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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: end of life

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