When we told the patient and his family that the mass in his lung was highly concerning for cancer, he didn’t say anything. His daughter asked about his symptoms. His son-in-law asked when and how he could get a definitive diagnosis. His wife asked when he could go home. Finally, he spoke.
“I’m sorry for being so much trouble.” The tone was casually apologetic, ...
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“Your hands feel like velvet,” the 94-year-old woman told me as I pushed on her abdomen in the emergency department on a Friday night.
“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me all day,” I told her.
“That’s pretty sad,” she said, and her abdomen quivered as she suppressed a laugh.
I walked out of the curtained room and briefly presented her findings to the resident on call. In return, he showed me ...
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“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 time the rage was directed at me and only me.
For seven months, I had avoided being the bad guy. When a patient got upset, he accused my superiors, and I hid behind their ...
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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 infant, who already has a rare infection, also has a rare associated structural abnormality. It’s not benign, but it is fixable. The fix usually requires surgery.
As we walk over to the patient’s room to update her ...
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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 awake. Her abdomen would also hurt during exploratory surgery, although she wouldn’t be able to feel it under general anesthesia. Her body would feel it, though, and could respond by dangerously spiking ...
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“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 the interview room. The resident wanted to discuss his paranoid delusions; the patient wanted to discuss his discharge.
The patient wasn’t ready to leave because the medications that made the demons stay away were also making his ...
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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 you?” says the man who touched the patient’s shoulder.
“Oh, I’m fine.” He’s perfectly calm.
“I know this is a silly question,” continues the man, “but do you know where you are right now?”
“Of course, of course. I’m at ...
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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 I buried myself into a back corner, thumbing through pants twice my size, gave me away. A store clerk walked over and asked if I was okay. I knew I’d have to meet ...
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His face was four inches away from mine. I tried not to blink as he shined the ophthalmoscope’s light into my left eye and stared into my pupil as though it were the most interesting thing in the world. He frowned, placed his hand on my head, and used his thumb to pry my eyelid higher. He maneuvered for about 45 more seconds while I sat stone still, and then, suddenly, ...
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When the patient jokingly touched my nose, I knew I had muddied the boundaries between us too much and it was too late to go back.
(Note: Except for the aforementioned sentence, all of the patient’s details and quotations have been fabricated. Events from the interview and exam have been drawn from a conglomeration of patients and scrambled to illustrate a general theme.)
It didn’t happen until the end of the interview, ...
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