trauma – Pulse

Scenes From an Emergency Room–October 7, 2023

Hadar Sadeh November 5, 2023 10 Comments

Editor’s Note: Today we carry a submission received from an Israeli child-and-adolescent psychiatrist who works at Soroka Medical Center, about twenty-five miles from the Gaza Strip. In this account (translated by colleague Jennie Goldstein), Hadar Sadeh describes her experiences dealing with victims of violent trauma on October 7. As events have unfolded, we at Pulse are acutely aware that many stories on both sides of this conflict need to be told.

The Genesis of Forgetfulness: A Poet’s Journey

Shahé Mankerian October 24, 2023 6 Comments

“The poet’s job is to translate unspeakable things on to the page…” – Roger Robinson

In the beginning, the Lebanese civil war barely seeped through the ceiling of our living room. It didn’t shatter windows or infiltrate through cracked walls. It became a slow fixture at our dinner table, nibbled on Mama’s delicately wrapped grape leaves, inhaled Father’s unfiltered cigarettes, listened to my older brother practice scale after scale on the upright piano and sat on the Persian carpet with my younger brother to rearrange his Matchbox cars. In our Armenian family of five, the war felt mute—a sixth character without words, an unobtrusive intruder who was given permanent residency.

Acute Behavioral Crisis

Don Brunnquell January 27, 2023 6 Comments

“Who am I, do you know me,” she cries,
this day when earth has turned to rot and mud.
she can not see but for the blaze of anger,
she can not hear the softer voices calling.

After the Fall

Victoria Dukharan November 5, 2021 9 Comments

It is a chilly January night, a week after New Year’s and a few days after my twenty-fourth birthday. I’m halfway through my third year of medical school and have just started my clerkship on the hospital’s trauma unit.

I’ve been dreading this experience; I’m on twenty-four-hour call, and my heart sinks every time the pager goes off.

You Are Made of Grace

Jeanne J. LeVasseur October 22, 2021 7 Comments

What beauty the world holds cupped between
light and dark,
everything mortal,
rising with the sun, the grass bright with the shine of rain.

Extracurriculars

Danielle Ellis June 17, 2020 15 Comments

If harsh words fall, but no patient is around to hear them, do they make a sound?

This particular night on my trauma-surgery rotation as a fourth-year medical student, the question weighs heavily as a page alerts the team that a patient with multiple gunshot wounds will arrive in ten minutes.

Everyone’s kind of excited. Anxious, too. Jittery.

1:00 am. Down in the ED, the main actors stand masked, gowned and ready to go. ED Cowboy stands at the head of the bed, Surgery Senior stands to the side. Alongside them, the throngs of people without obvious purpose who always seem to show up just in time for the evening’s episode of “drama in the trauma bay.” Everyone’s done this a thousand times before. Well,

Wounded Healer

Jamie Sweigart September 7, 2018 11 Comments

Jamie Sweigart ~

It was a sunny Sunday afternoon on my urban college campus. I’d been sitting on the grass outside a lecture hall where my premed classmates and I would study together on weekends. This particular weekend, I was alone. Campus was empty, except for a man with a backpack who occasionally passed by.

Finished with studying, I started walking down a deserted sidewalk back to my apartment, a few blocks away. On the way, I dialed my best friend from home, Laura, and we began chatting.

“Hang up the phone,” said a man’s voice behind me. I felt the cold blade of a knife against the side of my neck.

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: trauma

Scenes From an Emergency Room–October 7, 2023