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The World’s Second-Best Baklava

Zoran Naumovski October 28, 2022 16 Comments

In 2013, as a hospitalist, I attended the annual conference of the Society of Hospital Medicine. This meant traveling from my home base in Ohio to Washington, DC, the site of that year’s conference.

The second day was winding down. Colleagues, new friends and countless strangers were scurrying to their rooms to freshen up and get ready for a night out on the town, where they’d continue to mingle, share research and professional achievements and scout out career opportunities.

I had other plans, however.

Portrait of My Father

Martin Kohn June 18, 2021 5 Comments

…the son of a ragman

Half-tilt at a stack of 78’s looking for a gem
For Nina, for Dinah, for Phineas Newborn
For Monk

Never Say Die

Christine Todd August 26, 2016 26 Comments

Christine Todd

In November of my intern year, I had trouble finding the sun. It was dark when I woke up for work, and it was dark when work was done and I headed back home. I’d picked up the service on the cancer ward from an intern named Bob, and Bob had left me six handwritten pages on the subject of Jim Franklin.

And this was the deal: Jim Franklin, thirty-seven years old, had been living on the cancer ward for the last three months. He had a two-foot-high stack of records, and the pity and admiration of nearly every nurse, tech and doctor in the hospital. He’d been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma four years earlier, treated with chemotherapy and thought to

Bare Hands and an Open Heart

Mary Falk July 26, 2016 No Comments

I am constantly obsessing over fingers and toes in the ICU. They can tell us so much about whether our high-tech machines and drugs are helping to keep our patients’ bodies perfused with oxygenated blood. Some patients’ fingers and toes are warm and pink. Some are cold and black, even falling off. A lot are dirty…really dirty. Like with actual dirt clogged under overgrown nails. I won’t lie and pretend that these nails don’t gross me out a little bit. Or deny that I typically wear gloves when I am touching these patients’ hands or feet.

Lipstick

Linda Koebner June 8, 2016 No Comments

My mother’s scent, Replique, always entered my bedroom an instant before she did. The message my nose carried to my brain, then on to my heart, was “She’s going out tonight.”

She would first sit on the edge of my mattress. The comfort of her nearness would always be overshadowed by the sadness that I knew would overtake me once she left me alone. But we both pretended it didn’t matter. She’d say all the requisite things like “Sleep tight” and “See you in the morning” and “I love you.” And then she would kiss my hand and be gone–leaving behind a waxy, deep-red imprint of her lips, pressed onto my skin.

Desperately Seeking Herb Weinman

Steven Lewis March 15, 2013 1 Comment

Steven Lewis

Minor chest pains that woke me early one morning–and which did not go away three, four, five, six hours later–landed me flat on my back at a local emergency room, a perversely comforting beep beep beep issuing from the monitor hanging precariously over my head.

Frankly, I didn’t really think that I was having a heart attack–as a former EMT, a devoted watcher of medical television, and a cultural cousin of Woody Allen, I’m ridiculously well versed in the symptoms of a myocardial infarction. However, after I’d endured a morning of chest pains at an age where all warranties have lapsed, it was prudent to go to the hospital. And since my wife was out of town–and my grown kids off with

Five Years Later

Steven Lewis October 19, 2012 No Comments

Steve Lewis

Evenings in the Sloan-Kettering ICU were starkly lit–nowhere to hide from the glare, bloodshot eyes trained on blinking lights, buzzing machines, masked men and women passing soundlessly through sliding glass doors, and little but hours and hours of bright, eerie luminosity ahead.

By contrast, the days then were dark. No comfort to be found in the sunrise or in that old salve about everything looking better in the morning. My wife and kids and I sat on the edge of uncomfortable couches in dimly lit waiting rooms where the waiting was always either too long or never long enough; we stood shoulder to shoulder in airless elevators with strangers sharing the same muted despair; we sat huddled in the cafeteria and did not

Epiphany

George Saj April 20, 2012 No Comments

George Saj

It happened one wintry night in 1965. I was in my third year of medical school during a rotation on the pulmonary service.

My supervising intern had been busy all evening admitting a dozen people in various stages of respiratory distress; they were suffering from ailments ranging from flu to double pneumonia.

It was my job to collect each patient’s sputum and culture it on a Petri dish, which would take several days to grow out. I also prepared stained slides of each sample. We did this in hopes of being able to visually identify the offending bacteria, so that we could speedily administer the appropriate antibiotic.

This was painstaking work: the intern and I had to repeatedly re-check

Adam

Genevieve Yates October 22, 2010 No Comments

Genevieve Yates

I tried to focus on the chart in front of me, but it may as well have been written in Russian. I’d been awake for thirty-two hours, and my brain, thick with fatigue, refused to cooperate. I knew I shouldn’t be working, but I was too proud, too stubborn, too something to admit that I wasn’t coping.

On the first day of my neurosurgical rotation, the resident I was replacing had told me, “Ten-to-fourteen-hour days, twelve days on, two days off. Say goodbye to your life for the next three months!”

I was prepared for the long hours, endless paperwork and ward-round humiliations. I expected that it might be necessary to take a leave of absence from my personal life. What I didn’t expect was

Family Business

Joanne Wilkinson March 5, 2010 No Comments

Joanne Wilkinson

My mother’s mother was more a force of nature than a person. Chablis in hand, stockings bagging a little over her solid, practical navy pumps, she delivered her opinions without the slightest sugar-coating. She used words like “simply” and “absolutely” a lot. “He is quite simply the worst mayor we’ve ever had.” “She had absolutely no business having four children.” My cousins and I all listened and quaked, hoping the wrath would not be turned on us. Even after my mother’s death, when you might imagine she would soften toward me a little, I still felt the need to stand up straighter whenever she looked at me. Behind her back, I called her “The Graminator.”

The Graminator had been retired for almost

Mom

Diane Guernsey December 5, 2009 No Comments

Diane Guernsey

By this time next week, my mother may be dead.

In a sense, she’s been dying for a long time. This leg of her journey is the last in a decades-long trek with Parkinson’s disease.

She lies there, her head small and delicate on the pillow. Her hair is a wispy white thatch; her throat muscles are rigid, as if she’s just lifted a huge barbell. But her breaths come slowly, with long pauses in between, as if she’s nearly too tired to go on. Her brown eyes stare up sightlessly, lids half-open.

This nursing facility is part of a stepped-care retirement center where my parents moved more than ten years ago, anticipating the day when my mom would need

Maman

Paul Gross November 20, 2009 No Comments

Paul Gross

At a recent religious service I attended with Maman, my 87-year-old mother, I watched her fumbling attempts to find hymn number 123, “Spirit of Life,” in the hymnal. I held my book up, opened to the appropriate page, so that we both could sing from it.

She glanced up momentarily, tightened her lips, hunched forward and resumed turning pages, finally arriving at the song when the congregation was singing the second verse, which she needed help finding–what with her poor vision and the swirl of notes and words on the page.

As this ritual repeated itself, hymn after hymn, it occurred to me how much cozier it would be if my mother and I could share from the same hymnal.

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: personal remembrance

The World’s Second-Best Baklava

Portrait of My Father

Never Say Die

Bare Hands and an Open Heart

Lipstick

Desperately Seeking Herb Weinman

Five Years Later

Epiphany

Adam

Family Business

Mom

Maman

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: personal remembrance

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