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

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Girl Talk

Warren Holleman November 12, 2010 No Comments

Warren Holleman

“I got pregnant. Quit sports, quit school. Quit all my dreams.”

Brenda looks fit and handsome, despite the scar running down the middle of her face. At six feet tall, she commands respect, even though her sweet, high-pitched voice belies her imposing physique.

We are sitting in a circle: Brenda, six other women and me. Most are in their thirties and forties, and in their fourth or fifth month of sobriety. They look professional in the suits they’ve assembled from the donations closet of our inner-city recovery center.

No one is surprised when Brenda says that, twenty years ago, she trained for the U.S. Olympic volleyball team.

“Did you ever compete again?” someone asks.

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

Brenda shakes her head. The group

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Bruised

Eileen M.K. Bobek November 5, 2010 No Comments

Eileen M.K. Bobek

The year after I finished my emergency medicine residency, I had all four of my wisdom teeth pulled. 

Afterwards, I looked as if I had taken several punches to my face. My jaw was swollen, my skin a cornucopia of muddied blues, purples, greens, yellows and reds. If people didn’t know better, I told my husband with a laugh, they might think that I’d been beaten. 

It took weeks for the swelling and discoloration to resolve. I went about my life, aware of both my face and people’s responses to it. Their pitying, uncomfortable, sometimes disgusted expressions told me what they were thinking: I was being abused. But nobody ever asked me how I was, how it had happened or even if

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Angels and Phantoms

Joanna Dognin August 13, 2010 No Comments

Joanna Dognin

“Mama,” a little voice pipes from the back seat. “Why is that boy in a chair?”

The sun is beaming into the car as we sit at a stoplight, waiting to exit a store parking lot. My two-year-old daughter has spotted a young man, barely twenty, who smiles weakly as he rolls by in an electric wheelchair, collecting money for muscular dystrophy.

“He’s in a chair because he needs help moving around,” I say.

“Why?”

“Because his legs need help.”

“Why? Because they don’t work?”

“Well…”

“Why are they broken?” she asks. “Is he broken? Why is he here? Where is his mama? Mama, where is the boy’s mama?”

* * * * *

“Dr. Lobozzo, you got any

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James and Bob

Paul Rousseau July 30, 2010 No Comments

Paul Rousseau

I think his name was James, but I can’t remember for sure. What I do remember is the day’s heat, the metal cart and a rust-colored dog. 

Like many homeless people, James carried his belongings in a grocery cart–a sort of mobile home for the homeless, but without the protection of a roof, the support of four walls or the security of a front door.

I’d just walked out of the local Safeway store into its parking lot. He ambled over from a park across the street. His eyes were narrow, his face tanned and his clothes dirty brown from weeks of sleeping in the streets.

Being a dog lover, I found my eyes drawn to the dog–a mixed breed with matted hair,

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Medecins sans frontieres — Liberia, 2003

Les Cohen January 29, 2010 No Comments

Les Cohen ~

I walk warily, 

searching for life
through smoking remains
of a jungle village.

My flashlight beam
slices the black haze
of equatorial darkness.
Was it Suakoko?
Fokwelleh?

No wind, rustle or drum
pierces the silence
of West African night.
Torched husks of thatched huts,
clay walls liquefied,
charred dog skeletons,
feet outstretched
as if running from Hell.
Stench of burnt flesh pervades,
stinging eyes and nostrils.

Soft footsteps coming close.
A small, thin boy approaches;
mahogany face, bright teeth
glisten in the moonlight.
Bloody machete, strings of

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Help Me

Jennifer Reckrey November 13, 2009 No Comments

Jennifer Reckrey

Editor’s Note: Jennifer Reckrey kept a weekly journal of her experiences during her intern year.


Week 13

I had a few free minutes at the end of my clinic session this past Thursday morning, so I took over a walk-in patient from an overbooked colleague.

The patient was a large, muscular Salvadoran man in his early forties who had long-standing hypertension. He said that for the past three months, he’d been feeling tired and didn’t have the energy to take his daily medications. Just a few months back, he’d finished a five-year prison sentence for armed robbery. Now he was living temporarily with his twenty-year-old daughter and her boyfriend, but he told me that he couldn’t

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One More Child Left Behind

Brian T. Maurer October 23, 2009 No Comments

Brian T. Maurer

Making the diagnosis might be straightforward, but sometimes getting adequate medical care poses a more formidable challenge.

It was the end of an exhausting afternoon in our busy pediatric practice in Enfield, Connecticut. I had just finished seeing what I thought was the last patient of the day, only to find yet another chart resting in the wall rack, a silent signal that one more patient waited behind an adjacent closed door.

His name was Aaron. Six years old, he sat on the exam table cradling his left arm in his lap. The most striking thing about the arm was the large bluish bulge on the side of his elbow. His mother stood by his side; his grandmother sat in

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The Emaciated Infant

Paula Lyons September 11, 2009 No Comments

Paula Lyons

The police had been called to the house by a neighbor who said she heard children crying and hadn’t seen the mother in two days. It was the middle of a night in July, and the children’s wails would have traveled through the project windows left open to catch cooling breezes.

Paramedics provided transport to the hospital, but the normally cynical and well-defended police were so outraged that they also came to the ER, where I was the resident on call.

The police came to find and punish those who had neglected this waif, but I also sensed that, despite their tough exteriors, they came also to vent their impotent rage and to seek reassurance that this tiny, dirty, appealing thing

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See One, Do One, Teach One

Lisa DeTora February 20, 2009 No Comments

Lisa DeTora

Back when I was in graduate school and working as a medical writer, a physician told me that the key to learning medical knowledge was simple: see one, do one, teach one. It was a clever (and effective) way of convincing me that I was qualified to teach something–like how to write a report–that I’d only attempted once myself.

Now, on days when nothing goes right, I find myself thinking back to that expression–and to the years when I used to see and do more, before I tried to teach anyone anything.

Soon after college, I worked at a private outpatient facility supervising the care and treatment planning for eighteen developmentally disabled adults. I was, in my own fashion, hoping to make a

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little black boy

Jimmy Moss November 14, 2008 No Comments

Jimmy Moss

little black boy
sit down.
fold your hands into your lap
and put your lap into order
now cry me a little song.
sing me a little note about me 
caring about what you care about,
then dream me a little dream.
and when your tears turn into
oases and exposed rivers
stand up
and pour me a little cup
fill it with every broken promise
and the unfulfilled moments of
belated birthdays and first days
of the school year when your
clothes were unkempt…then
tell me a little secret
about how–you wish your father
bothered enough to be a father 
or fathered another version of you,
so that you could have a friend
and then
write me a little poem.
make me

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