Stepping off the bus, the first faces
I see are the same every February.
Hard construction hats, yellow vests
flashing, grit etched upon their faces.
Daylight Savings ensures that these
are the last sights of light before
entering sterile linoleum floors.
“He basically killed me,” Sam said flatly, sitting my office. “I don’t want to talk to him.”
I nodded sadly with understanding as his on-demand oxygen hissed away each moment, like the ticking of a clock. Why would a patient want to speak to a doctor who’d missed his diagnosis? Why should he?
As I drove home after seeing my CT scan, I thought about how I could avoid telling anyone my diagnosis. It would be easy, I figured. I would wait until I had written confirmation of what I had seen. A few days passed, and I was able to maintain the deception–I loved acting, and this was an easy role for me, as protector of my family.
When the radiology report arrived, I felt like I was reading a report about one of my patients: “…suggestive of malignancy,”  it said. I kept looking at the name and birthdate–yes, this was my report. Thus began my path down the rough road of lung cancer.
Alan Blum
About the artist:Â
Alan Blum is a professor and Gerald Leon Wallace MD Endowed Chair in family medicine at the University of Alabama School of Medicine in Tuscaloosa. A self-taught artist, he has published three books of his sketches and stories of patients, and his artworks have appeared in more than a dozen medical journals and textbooks. He is a frequent guest speaker at medical schools in courses in the humanities.
About the artwork:
“From my first year of medical school until the last day of my family medicine residency, I kept a visual diary, filling numerous notebooks with clinical vignettes, stories
Gary Hoff
About the artist:Â
I am Associate Professor of Medicine at the Des Moines University College of Osteopathic Medicine where I have taught cardiology for many years. My career as an artist runs in parallel with my career in medicine. My work is primarily in oils and consists of commissioned portraits as well as landscapes and still life.
About the artwork:
“Dying Woman is a portrait of my mother during the last month of her life, as she was dying of metastatic lung cancer. The drawing is in an old medium called silverpoint, which was the method used by old master painters long before graphite. It allows a precise but unerasable line
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