Control
If Harvard had a habit of failing its students, I would have failed my observed patient interview last week. Take a patient history and do a physical exam. It was the same exercise we had been doing...
View ArticleProvisions
Impersonal and self-absorbed as Manhattan may be, it’s still embarrassing to cry on West 32nd Street. I looked for a store, any store, and ducked inside. The pace of my steps and angle of my head as...
View ArticleWalls
Last Monday I sat in a chilly exam center for eight hours and took a very important test. When I arrived home, I looked at the walls surrounding my desk. They were cluttered with upwards of seventy...
View ArticlePlastic Lessons
I always feel awkward when I talk to plastic patients. The simulation mannequins are impressive: their eyes blink, their chests expand as they breathe, they have pulses, they bleed, they burn. A...
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Undraped
He was nervous about having his uterus and ovaries out. I had gotten on well with him in the surgical holding area. I didn’t get to ask what I really wanted to, instead skimming over shallower...
View ArticleInteresting
I pull up a test result for my patient, and the senior resident standing behind me lets out an excited squeal. “I’ve never seen the imaging come back positive for this,” she says. Our two-week-old...
View ArticlePain Control
She had only been in the hospital twice in her life: once when she was nine and now, 60 years later. She had gotten tonsils out then. She was getting tumors out now. Her abdomen hurt when she was...
View ArticleWaking Up
An elderly man startles awake after a man in a white coat touches his shoulder. He looks around and sees three other white-coated people standing around his bed. “Sir? Good afternoon, sir. How are...
View ArticleOasis
“By the way,” my chief resident told me on the first day of my inpatient psychiatry rotation, “don’t lick your lips in front of him.” “Wait, what happens if–” I fell silent as the patient walked into...
View ArticleBeing Sorry
“You’re not sorry.” Within two days two different patients said this to me, each with hatred in his voice. Each time I was alone, each time I had known the patient for only a few minutes, and each...
View ArticleA Move to Scientific American
“Curious, have you considered joining a blogging network?” was how Brian Mossop, then Community Manager of PLOS ended his email to me over a year and a half ago. I hadn’t. It only took two phone...
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Witness borne
“I need you.” The resident looked at me. It was a rare permutation of words for a third year medical student to hear. After glancing behind me to make sure she wasn’t addressing someone else, I waited...
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Time of death
I really hoped she was dead. It wasn’t personal. It was as far from personal as possible. I had never met the patient while she was alive. Every four days, my team and I are on call at the hospital....
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Information Withheld
“452 passed,” the ICU nurse told me. I couldn’t remember who she was. I looked for her name on the list among the several dozens of patients I was cross-covering. “452 passed,” the attending said to me...
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Family at Bedside
68 year old male with past medical history as below. 68 year old male dies in emergency room for 20 minutes. Found unresponsive by wife. Wife still screaming. 68 year old male status post cardiac...
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Trees
“She’s a 66-year-old with a history of whatever, who came in for whatever,” the medical admitting resident told our ICU team as we approached her room in the emergency department. What he meant was,...
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