Katie Lin
It’s 2:00 am, and the fluorescent bulbs flicker gently overhead along the quiet hallways of the intensive-care unit.
Tonight I’m the ICU resident on call, and the weight of that title sits heavily on my shoulders. My team is in charge of keeping our critically ill patients safe from harm overnight. Although the supervising physician is only a phone call away, I’m the acting team lead for any codes called during the night on patients elsewhere in the hospital who may need our life-support services. Code Blue: cardiac arrest. Code 66: anything else requiring assistance.
The metronomic beeping of the life-support machines keeps time as I blink the weariness from my eyes and share a few muted smiles with the
Julie List
Two years ago, I’d just begun my new post as clinical supervisor at the caregiver-support center at a large medical institution. The center offers emotional and practical support to families of patients who are dealing with serious illnesses and hospitalizations.
In my short time there, I’d already encountered many memorable clients, but somehow I felt a special connection with one woman, Maria. A small, intense woman with piercing dark eyes, she often came to see us between her visits to her husband, Felipe, who lay gravely ill in the hospital’s cardiac intensive-care unit.
Always with Maria on her visits to Felipe were their three twentysomething daughters, Rosa, Alicia and Blanca. The family’s closeness touched me–especially when it became clear that Felipe’s
Jonathan Gotfried
From my wife’s grandparents’ Manhattan apartment, I could hear the noises of traffic and pedestrians in Central Park, seven floors below. The sounds made a refreshing change from the beeping monitors, overhead pages and ringing phones that are the usual backdrop to my work as a physician in a large Philadelphia medical center. Here the only background conversations I heard were those of loved ones in the kitchen, not those of patients’ family members, overheard through flimsy curtains ringing an adjacent bed.
The hospice nurse quietly moved about the apartment. My wife sat close by her grandfather, Werner (whom we called Saba, Hebrew for grandfather), speaking softly with him as he lay there in bed. Our two-year-old son sat nearby, dutifully
It’s easy to get lost in the hospital. I’m only an intern, and already I know it like the hallways of my old high school, every doorway and doorknob. But overnight, as I float between the floors and the units, answering pages, I quickly lose track of where I am, what time it is, what day it is.
I am vaguely aware that I’m on the fifth floor, the top floor of the hospital, when the nurse approaches me.
“Doctor, the patient in Bed 32.”
Amanda Anderson
I softly scrub blood from the teeth of a man who died moments ago. From the chair where I sat quietly writing nursing notes while he quietly ended, my patient’s sallow skin and sunken cheeks looked so peaceful. But the weeks of stagnant residue on his teeth bothered me.
To brush the teeth of someone who was in the process of dying would have contradicted my orders to provide comfort care, and my own good sense. So I waited until he took his last breaths before I closed my computer screen and gathered my tools–washcloth, water, toothbrush.
I brush now, so briefly, for the pride of this man I didn’t know, and I brush for the family that I wish
Ronna L. Edelstein
For years, and especially as he entered his nineties, my father kept begging me not to “dump” him into a nursing home. He had seen too many of his cronies abandoned in this way by family members; his visits with these friends left him feeling depressed and hopeless for days. I assured Dad that I’d never put him in a facility.
It was an easy promise to make. I didn’t want him in a One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest setting with a Nurse Ratched supervising his care. I didn’t want him waking up at night disoriented and lonely. Because he was inching closer to death, the greatest unknown, I didn’t want a facility, with all of its unknowns, to
E. Wesley Ely
The first time I saw Jessa, she lay crumpled in the ICU bed, paralyzed, expressionless and unable to speak. A military veteran, she had fought in Desert Storm, but she now was facing a deadlier and more inexorable foe: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), aka Lou Gehrig’s disease.
This disease causes progressive loss of muscle control, and Jessa was unable to speak, eat or breathe on her own. Her only means of communicating was through small facial movements–opening and closing her eyes or mouth, raising her eyebrows.
A dozen people made up her ICU team: three interns, three residents, a pharmacist, a nurse, a respiratory therapist, a social worker, a hospital chaplain and myself–the lead physician, or intensivist.
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