1. Reread the stern words, hammered into a sterile printout. The scope results: a scythe. Images of an alien inhabiting his inner world. 2. Notice the footprints on our living-room floor. Briefly consider cleaning. 3. Three breaths later. Hug him. Hug the kids. Hug myself. Hug the dogs. Tilt my head when he says that he doesn’t want to hug right now.
Can you see this patient today? His appointment is tomorrow, he came all the way from Nebraska. Can you work extra tomorrow, we are short, just four hours extra? Would you be able to work Christmas this year?
Timeline One Day 1: For over thirty-five years my strong, spirited spouse, Carlo, served around the world in the Air Force. Now retired from the military, he still serves at the air base as a civilian security police officer. His neck hurts. A lot. He blames the pain on the unbalanced weight of the bulletproof vest that Uncle Sam added last year to the uniform he proudly wears every day.
Karen Libertoff Harrington As a medical educator in a hospital setting, I often tell first-year medical students about disparities in health care and about the vastly different quality of care that hospitals deliver, depending on their resources. I tell my students how important it is to advocate for patients, to learn to navigate the healthcare system and to work respectfully with health professionals in order to get optimal care for your patients. When my own son was hospitalized, I had an opportunity to put my teachings into practice, and found them wanting. It was a Thursday evening in early spring, the first hint of green emerging on the lawn of my suburban Connecticut home. My son David called from Manhattan to say that he had
Ray Bingham I entered the hospital by a back door. It was evening. As I walked down the quiet corridors, their cinder-block walls, green paint, tiled floors and soft fluorescent lighting granted me a superficial sense of familiarity: I’d walked these halls countless times over the last five years. Now, however, I also felt a bit apprehensive. I was not supposed to be here. Two weeks before, I’d been laid off. It had been the second round of staffing cuts in six months–due, the administrators said, to declining revenues. They made this claim despite the continued high numbers of patients in my unit, the newborn intensive-care unit, or NICU. As a veteran nurse, I’d spoken up. The cuts, I’d said, were leading to understaffing, to
Ellen Diamond Recently, while reading a post in an online chat group for people with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), I spotted an intriguing comment. At an important conference, a world-renowned hematologist had referred to a “five-year timeline” for a cure. This took me back fourteen years, to when I’d just been diagnosed with CLL. There was a Gilda’s Club near my workplace; I’d always passed it quickly on my way home. Now I found myself stepping through the doorway to hear a top specialist talk about my disease. I recall his closing words: “Give me five years, and I’ll give you a cure.” As desperately as I wanted to believe this pronouncement, I felt reluctant to pin my hopes on it. Fourteen years later, my
Rachel Willis Sitting with my mother in a white-walled exam room, awaiting the surgeon’s arrival, I felt happy. Earlier this spring, I’d landed hard on one leg during a volleyball game and collapsed, hearing my knee make a terrible cracking sound, like all ten knuckles firing off. When I resumed playing, after several weeks of rehab, it happened again. Now we were awaiting the MRI results. You’d think I’d be nervous. I was seventeen, college-bound on a full-ride volleyball scholarship. Would this injury jeopardize that? But I felt glad–and touched with a kind of glamour. During hundreds of boring or grueling practices, I’d longed to sprain an ankle or break a leg. Now I had an iron-clad excuse to duck the huge workout packet my
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 balls,” he’d said as we drove to the hospital. “My procedure shouldn’t take that long.” “Are
Zohar Lederman I am a medical student in Pavia, Italy, doing my fifth year out of six. It is summertime, and, as I’ve done every summer for years, I’ve returned to my small hometown in the south of Israel. There, among other things, I volunteer as an emergency medical technician (EMT) with Magen David Adom, the Israeli Red Cross. It’s 7:30 on a Friday morning. I’m at the Red Cross office, talking with the paramedic and a doctor, when a young volunteer runs in. “There’s a car pulling up outside–they’re bringing an unconscious patient!” he says. The paramedic goes to get the advanced life support equipment, and the doctor and I quickly go out to the car. The patient, a pale, eighty-year-old women, sits in
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.)Â Each plan leaves the room with the patient, melded with his or her hopes. It is real–you can hold it in your
Margaret Kim Peterson “Are you a doctor?” I am sitting by my husband’s hospital bed in the surgical admission ward, where he is being prepped for surgery to close a severe pressure ulcer on his left ischium, the knob on the pelvis where your weight rests when you sit. Dwight was eighteen when an illness damaged his spinal cord, rendering him a paraplegic. He is 49 now, and developing the kinds of problems that go along with being a middle-aged cripple (his self-descriptor of choice). One such problem is pressure ulcers. We thought we’d learned how to manage these, but met our match in this one, which has refused to heal no matter what we’ve done. Finally Dwight has agreed to surgery, and to the
Paul Gross One thing I love deeply about being a family doctor is that I get to take care of people–body and soul. A patient comes into my exam room with a litany of physical symptoms (“My shoulder…my knee…my stomach…so tired…this nausea…”) and then, in response to a questioning look, suddenly bursts into tears. It’s all mine to deal with. The shoulder. The stomach. The tears. I get to gather the pieces and see if we can’t put this broken person back together again. What a privilege. And yet the joy of primary care is also its curse. With each patient, I have to keep track of everything–the trivial and life-threatening, the physical and mental, the acute, the chronic and the preventive. And try as
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