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

SubscribeEnergizeOR
Facebook Instagram Tiktok Bluesky

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

SubscribeEnergizeOR
Facebook Instagram Tiktok Bluesky
  1. Home
  2. /
  3. surgery
  4. /
  5. Page 2

Tag: surgery

The OR in Promise

Lydia Flores January 18, 2019 2 Comments
Lydia Flores ~

a paper gown, an intravenous tube and silence greater than my symptoms
sterile sheets speak my fear & insecurity saying will you be there with me
come back after the anesthesia has broken up with me and hold me

could you love a cure that hasn’t found itself yet? will your grace go down
with me weeping and swinging because time is spilling its sand and I am
the ocean afraid to leave?

When the machine goes beep, beep–beep long note
and my body lets go of the hold on my soul
the physician notes the time of my go, will you sigh so I know

Read More »

My Friend, My Patient

Andrea Eisenberg May 18, 2018 6 Comments

Andrea Eisenberg ~

Seeing patients in my ob/gyn office this morning, I try to stave off the mild nervousness rumbling inside of me. My good friend Monica is having a C-section this afternoon, and I’m performing it.

We met ten years ago, when I walked my three-year-old daughter into Monica’s preschool classroom for the first time. Monica sat on the floor, a child in her lap and others playing around her. Like them, I felt drawn by her calm, soothing manner and infectious laugh.

Over time, our friendship grew: At school or social gatherings, we always ended up giggling together. We took family trips together, trained together for marathons and supported each other through heartaches–my divorce, the closing of her childcare business–and

Read More »

Post-Op Poet

Judy Schaefer August 12, 2017 7 Comments

Judy Schaefer ~

How can I write a poem, nurse, in this pelted room? Nurse? Nurse!
Memory loss, southern pine–nurse, this is not a poem-writing-room
The floors ooze resin at your footsteps
          Spanish moss, from every wall
Spongy trod of medical students
Surgery went well, anesthesia lifted
Cologne of betadine, a boarish root for a vein
at the same time each morning. I welcome
the lady of the mop–tincture of mossy pine
back and forth, she says her prayers. She is my alarm clock.
I peek from crusty eyelids and dread the washcloth
Back and forth–path and path–room and nurse
How does one begin a poem? How to start?
Anesthesia has lifted long

Read More »

Working Without a Net in Kenya

Bruce Campbell August 1, 2017 1 Comment

The thirteen-year-old boy sits in a battered ENT exam chair. Henry, my Kenyan colleague, hands me a blurry CT scan. “His neck mass has grown for two years,” Henry says. “We think it is a glomus vagale tumor. Do you agree?”

I hold the scan up to a window. The vascular mass fills the side of the boy’s neck, displacing his carotid artery. “That’s probably right,” I respond. “At home, we would get more studies. We would prepare for bleeding. This kind of surgery can be very dangerous, even fatal.”

Read More »

Falling Fifth: The Neurosurgery Patient and the Anesthesiologist

Audrey Shafer January 13, 2017 16 Comments

based on Robert Schumann’s Third String Quartet, Movement 1

Audrey Shafer

We meet in the holding room; a paper dress covers your tattoos

At any moment, your craze of fragile vessels
could spill, fill the sea cave cradling your mind

Your wife holds your hand until it is time for us to go

I guide you as you blow through a straw
swimming across your long day of surgery

Five hours, and five more: surgeons untangle
a crevice of your brain, clamp the feeder, reassemble your skull

Read More »

OR Tears

Anne Vinsel December 12, 2015 8 Comments

Anne Vinsel

Tears in the operating room are different from tears cried by civilians, by veals.
There are rules.

A single tear from one eye is unobjectionable.
Two tears, either one from each eye
          or two from one eye
          are permitted if they are unaccompanied by sniffles.
Three tears risks discovery and humiliation.
There are rules.

The mechanics of crying in the OR are difficult.
You may not brush a tear away.
Sterile and dirty may not touch.
Gloved sterile hands may not swipe unsterile eyes.
Best to let your tear take a quick dive into your blue pleated mask
          which will blot it up before it can drop into the sleeping

Read More »

Night Call

Heidi Johnson-Wright September 11, 2015 10 Comments

Heidi Johnson-Wright

When I was nine years old, I was diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disorder that triggers an inflammatory response of the joints, causing swelling, stiffness and severe pain. The disease sped through my body like wildfire.

By the time I was fifteen, my hip joints were utterly ruined. Just getting out of bed was a slow, carefully choreographed sequence of movements, with frequent pauses to allow the pain to subside. When I walked, my hips emitted sickening crunching sounds, bone grinding on bone.

I kept denying how bad my hips were, because I knew that the only solution was joint-replacement surgery. The thought of having my joints sawed through and torn away, and then having metal replacements hammered

Read More »

The Circulating Nurse Enters the Operating Room

Cortney Davis August 7, 2015 15 Comments

Cortney Davis

Let me not be blinded by the glare of the spotlight
or distracted by the tangle of plastic tubes,

the stink of anesthesia waiting in its multi-chambered
monolith of sleep. Let me stand beside the patient

and look into his eyes. Let me say, we will take care of you.
Let me understand what it is to be overcome by fear.

Let me secure my mask and turn to the counting and opening,
the writing down. Let me watch closely and, if I have to,

Read More »

Witnessing Consent for an Autopsy

Patty Bertheaud Summerhays December 2, 2011 No Comments

Patty Bertheaud Summerhays

“They just cut the abdomen like an operation, look in and sew him up. No one will know.”

I know the inside story–the body parts,
the heart, brain, liver, lungs,
kidney, spleen, bowel, and bladder
sliced on a cutting board
like loaves of bread.
The coroner donning a butcher’s apron
splattered with blood from the last
scrape of blade over bone,
slipping off the scalp like a mask.
The eyes stopping him 
like the end of sentences until
he doesn’t feel the frown of brow–
anger as he drills to its roots.

Emotions leaving both men
with a grasp of brain.

A slice of brain placed in formaldehyde
jiggles like a thought trying to collect its thoughts.

Every organ shredded and a

Read More »

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

Read More »

© 2024 Pulse - Voices from the Heart of Medicine, Inc. All rights reserved.

Website Design & Development by New York Design Studio, LLC

Start typing and press enter to search

Scroll to Top

Subscribe to Pulse.

It's free.

Facebook Instagram Tiktok Bluesky
GIVE THE GIFT OF PULSEGiveTHE GIFT OF Pulse