ICU

Over the Rainbow

David Corbin May 10, 2024 14 Comments

Two days after the bus crash, I died. It was March 1996. A bus traveling at 60 mph had hit the car I was in, shattering my fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae and instantly paralyzing me from the shoulders down.

I was only twenty years old, and father to a one-year-old son. I spent the following forty-eight hours at a nearby hospital, on life support in the ICU. I couldn’t speak or breathe on my own.

I survived those two days on a sense of faith, expressed in a mantra: This is just temporary.

Lessons From My Teachers

David G. Thoele April 19, 2024 14 Comments

In July 2003, a few days after I had started service as inpatient attending pediatric cardiologist at Lutheran General Children’s Hospital, the neonatologists, nurses and I met with Jenni and Tony to discuss their daughter Grace’s health status.

Grace, now two and a half weeks old, had seemed normal at birth. After a few hours, her skin color had turned blue: Her oxygen level was dangerously low. She’d been whisked off to the neonatal intensive-care unit (NICU), where tests showed that her heart function was poor due to high blood pressure in her lungs. Her heart and lungs began to fail, so we’d placed her on a heart-lung machine (ECMO) for sixteen days. Now taken off the machine, she was breathing with the help of

The Man Who Holds Hearts

Patti Bartholomew Heaps June 9, 2023 10 Comments

One spring day last year, I sat in the office of the man who was to be my husband’s heart surgeon, waiting to have one of the most important conversations of my life. My husband, Craig, sat next to me with his guide dog, Chase, at his feet.

The doctor—tall, dressed in surgical scrubs—came in, introduced himself and sat down. His eyes looked kind; his demeanor was serious.

Living and Letting Go in the ICU

Margie Hodges Shaw February 3, 2023 7 Comments

Driving from the Atlanta airport, I arrived at the hospital ICU where my mother had been admitted the day before for trouble breathing. This was the hospital where my siblings and I were born and where our father died. This was the hospital featured in The New York Times following the coronavirus outbreak in March 2020. The hospital still sees record numbers of COVID admissions, and I expected the staff to show signs of exhaustion and numbness to personal tragedy.

My brother was at our mother’s bedside, as he had been from the beginning. The critical-care attending physician was also present.

“Does the hospital have a palliative-care unit?” I asked.

Still Too Early

Rachael J. Murphy December 16, 2022 No Comments

Still too early to know if I’m here
They put up paper snowmen in the nursing station
On white walls
The familiar dull-high pitched rhythms
Open the list. It’s always here.
Labs, settings. Sats too low.
Are numbers really people-
“She’s maxing out – full code, too.”
“Who?”
“Bed 27.”

Things My Wife Left in the ICU

Paul Rousseau September 18, 2020 26 Comments

A pacemaker and defibrillator

Sheets pressed hard with suffering

Seven fingers and one arm, gangrenous dead

Unknown liters of blood

Failed kidneys

In the Biodome

Sandy Zaeh June 3, 2020 4 Comments

As a pulmonary and critical-care medicine fellow, I care for patients with a broad variety of respiratory ailments. But little did I know, as I examined my patient Mr. Smith in the outpatient pulmonary clinic this past winter, that I’d see him again only months later as my first patient with COVID-19.

Mr. Smith was tough as nails. A stoic retired steelworker and former smoker, he suffered from significant emphysema, but was inclined–by nature and by necessity–to fight through his symptoms with limited medical help.

A Series of Unfortunate Events

Holland M. Kaplan February 23, 2018 11 Comments

Holland M. Kaplan ~

I’m sitting in the ICU team room, staring at the computer, trying to look like I’m writing a note. But my head is pounding.

As an internal-medicine resident doing my first month of residency, I’ve found the ICU of the bustling county hospital a jarring place to start my training. Although I’d anticipated the clinical challenge of caring for very ill ICU patients, I was unprepared for the emotional burden of having to deliver devastating, life-altering news to them and to their family members.

Faint yells emerge from Room 7. They have an almost rhythmic quality: “Ahhh!”…(three seconds)…”Ahhh!”…(three seconds)…”Ahhh!”

It’s Ms. Burton. I’ve just gotten back from checking on her, but I plod back again.

Guinness

Linda Clarke April 29, 2016 16 Comments

Linda E. Clarke

Once upon a long eighteen years ago, I got sick.

I was just finishing ten years of hospital-based ethics work, and at first I thought that the work had made me sick. I thought that the stress of hearing so many difficult stories, of witnessing so much suffering, was hurting me. I was wrong.

I was sick from a growth in my brain.

The growth was found after I’d shuttled from doctor to doctor, from appointment to appointment, from X-ray to scan. It took a long year. By then, my pain was clothed in shame. Undiagnosed pain does that: It draws the gaze of friends, family and providers. Everyone looks for the cause.

“Soul pain,” said one

ICU Horror

Jessica Sandek April 29, 2016 1 Comment

Jessica Sandek

About the artist:

A native New Yorker, Jessica has been using art as her language of expression for most of her life. She earned her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and now lives in the mountains of Southern California, where she works as a full-time artist. “I am always taking a visual dictation of my surroundings; I listen closely to the things I see. The intricate detail in my artwork is a result of my desire to record what isn’t always obvious. My goal is to capture the essene of these

Sara Rempe May 27, 2011 No Comments

Sara Rempe

The women moved through silence
like monks through a garden, all focus

and white cotton, soaping, rinsing,
lifting her body to sponge

her swollen skin. We were
there when they cleaned her

of diarrhea, sliding an arm
under her when she struggled to move

she’d groan, suck in, drop–
limbs like thin shoots

of bamboo: rickety and trembling
under a papery sheet.

She’d climbed a mountain the week
before, stretching in the thin pure

air, ecstatic,
as though it were something other

than her body
that brought her there.

About the poet:

Sara Rempe

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: ICU

Over the Rainbow

Lessons From My Teachers

The Man Who Holds Hearts

Living and Letting Go in the ICU

Still Too Early

Things My Wife Left in the ICU

In the Biodome

A Series of Unfortunate Events

Guinness

ICU Horror

ICU

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: ICU

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