Home
/
resident stories
/
Page 4

Tag: resident stories

Lost in the Hospital

Christine Henneberg October 23, 2015 7 Comments

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.”

No Crying

Riddhi Shah July 3, 2015 9 Comments

Riddhi Shah

“There’s no crying in baseball!”

Over the years, my fellow surgery residents and I heard these words shouted countless times by Dr. Norris, a cantankerous elderly surgeon with whom we had the dubious pleasure of working.

Dr. Norris was a former Navy ship surgeon. He didn’t operate much anymore, but he fondly remembered the “good old days” when trainees spent days on end in the hospital. The phrase emerged whenever he felt a need to remind us that medicine was a grueling pursuit with no room for weakness, perceived or actual.

I don’t know if his remark was a thinly veiled sexist jab or merely an allusion to the movie A League of Their Own, but it stopped mattering once

After the Flood: Remembering Sandy

Lois Isaksen November 1, 2013 27 Comments

Lois Isaksen

Oct. 29, 2012

We’d just received word: within hours, Hurricane Sandy would hit New York City. As an emergency-medicine resident at NYU/Bellevue Hospital Center, I was working as fast as I could–examining patients, suturing wounds, setting bones, running families to the hospital pharmacy before it closed.

The lights flickered once, but I did not take it as the omen it was.

What We Carry

Sandra Miller June 21, 2013 No Comments

Sandra Miller

When I was an intern, we carried everything.
We carried manuals and little personal notebooks, frayed and torn,
crammed with tiny bits of wisdom passed on by a senior or attending.
Yet when a midnight patient rolled in with a myocardial infarction
we didn’t look anything up because there were only four drugs we could use:
morphine for the crushing pain,
nitroglycerin to flush open the vessels,
lidocaine for rebellious rhythms,
and furosemide for sluggish fluids.
I’m old.
We had nothing to block the betas or the calcium channels,
nothing to inhibit the ACEs,
no fancy clot-dissolvers,
just the patient and the strip.
Some made it, some didn’t.

Note to My Patient

Sarah Stumbar January 11, 2013 No Comments

You might be surprised to know that I’m lying here in bed still thinking of you two weeks after you’ve died.

During the month that I watched you die, I often wondered what it felt like to be you, with your deep, husky voice, rounded belly and stubborn anger. You’d once owned your own mechanic shop; now you were sitting here in a hospital bed, staring up at the medical team as we whirled in and out of your room. Staring up at me as I drew blood from your central line each morning.

Healing Words

Gretchen Winter January 6, 2012 1 Comment

Gretchen Winter

As a physician-in-training, I find joy in helping to ease pain and occasionally cure illness. But I often find my greatest sense of purpose in helping patients to heal emotionally, whether by allaying a patient’s fears, addressing a lingering concern or lending a listening ear.

Having majored in communications in college, I’d assumed that the patient-physician relationship would be the easy part of medicine. I’ve learned, though, that getting it right isn’t always easy.

An encounter with a patient named Mary Collins brought this lesson home to me.

As a third-year medical student, just finishing the third week of my family medicine clerkship at a community health center, I was starting to feel competent at performing the basic history and exam.

It was

Heroic Measures

Gil Beall December 30, 2011 No Comments

Gil Beall

“Doctor! Doctor! He’s stopped breathing!” the stout woman shouted, clutching at my white coat.

It was 1953, and I was a first-year resident responsible that night for the patients on the medical ward–including those in the four-bed room the woman pushed me into.

There I saw a melee taking place around a seventy-year-old man with chronic lung disease.

The man had been examined and admitted that evening by my colleague, who’d given me what little information he had before leaving for the night.

The man had been too absorbed in his breathing to talk much. We’d hooked him up to an oxygen tank and started an intravenous infusion of the bronchodilator aminophylline, which brought about modest improvement. We couldn’t think of anything else

Pained

Remya Tharackal Ravindran November 18, 2011 No Comments

Remya Tharackal Ravindran

The light from my pen torch strikes the steel-blue eyes of the patient lying before me. Her pupils stand wide open and still.

My pager’s shrilling pierces the quiet. Fumbling with the buttons, I read the message: “Call 7546 STAT.”

It’s my first rotation on the floor as a new internal medicine resident. I dial the number, various possible disasters bubbling through my head.

“The patient in 723, Mr. Martini, is complaining of severe abdominal pain,” says a nurse’s voice. “The day-shift resident ordered one milligram of morphine, but he refused it. I want you to come and evaluate him right away.”

“Can you give me

One Hundred Wiser

Anne K. Merritt April 22, 2011 No Comments

Anne K. Merritt

I gather my belongings: stained white coat, stethoscope, pen light, black ballpoint. I stuff the last two granola bars into my canvas bag. I glance at the clock on the microwave, which is three minutes fast.

Twenty-two minutes until my shift begins. One minute before I will lock the door to my apartment.

Precision is critical: ER shifts change fast and blend together, from late nights to early mornings to mid-afternoons. Suns set and rise, moons disappear then burst again into full spheres of light. But the rhythm remains fixed.

I gulp the last ounces of water and grab my keys just as the clock digits change.

Last week, I reached and surpassed my hundredth shift as a resident physician in the

Lost in the Numbers

Don Stewart December 3, 2010 No Comments

Donald Stewart

A nurse entered the operating room; her eyes–the only part of her face visible above her surgical mask–held a look of mild distress. She stood quietly until the surgeon noticed her.

“What is it?” he said.

“It’s your patient in 208, Doctor. His pressure is 82.”

“Systolic?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

The nurse was referring to Mr. Johnson. The previous week, we’d removed a small tumor from his lung without difficulty–and, until now, without complications. He’d been transferred out of Intensive Care to the main surgical floor, and that very morning we had removed the last drainage tubes from his chest. He was scheduled to go home the next day.

Now his blood pressure was plummeting.

“Doctor Stewart, break scrub and go see what’s going

Stuck

Ken Gordon June 18, 2010 No Comments

I have never told this story to anyone.

It all started one night about ten years ago, three months into my internship. I was on call, having just admitted a man with a possible meningitis.

He now lay curled up in fetal position on the bed in front of me, looking thin and ill. Preparing to administer a lumbar puncture (a diagnostic test that involves removing fluid from the spinal canal), I gently pushed his head further down towards his legs.

The University Hospital of Somewhere Else

Paula Lyons April 16, 2010 No Comments

Paula Lyons

July 1. My first day as a family medicine intern, assigned to Labor and Delivery, and my first night on call, 6 pm sharp. Enviously, I watched the other interns smartly packing up to go home.

“See you in the morning–maybe!” they joked.

I glanced at the status board: eight patients in labor. And now I was “in charge,” at least in name, till 7 am report tomorrow.

Several chaotic hours later, I finished helping a Guatemalan mother of five to deliver her sixth son. My hands were trembling.

Toweling the plucky little newborn dry, I admitted the truth: Despite my University Hospital’s

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: resident stories

Lost in the Hospital

No Crying

After the Flood: Remembering Sandy

What We Carry

Note to My Patient

Healing Words

Heroic Measures

Pained

One Hundred Wiser

Lost in the Numbers

Stuck

The University Hospital of Somewhere Else

Subscribe to Pulse.

It's free.

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: resident stories

Start typing and press enter to search

Subscribe to Pulse.

It's free.