My father suffered a massive stroke on a September night not long after his 83rd birthday. It left him conscious yet unable to talk and communicate, unable to swallow and almost completely paralyzed.
After numerous scans and other tests, his doctors determined that there was no chance of recovery. My father would never walk, talk, or swallow food again. With nothing more to do for him in the hospital, we — …
An excerpt from 11 out of 10: A Collection of Humorous Medical Short Stories.
When I was 16, I got a job as a “standardized patient.” My neighbor worked for a medical school, and they needed standardized patients for their medical students to practice talking to. Because apparently you can …
Theresa arrived in a cloud of noise and commotion.
She had called after four o’clock the day before, but I hadn’t noticed the new message in my electronic inbox before I left the clinic.
Her almost brand new alprazolam bottle and her pain pills were missing, and Theresa was reeling. As she walked down the hall to the exam room, I heard her explain to Autumn how she had been to Walmart …
This story is a great one.
It’s about a female dog with only three legs. Her fourth leg was amputated following a traumatic accident as a puppy.
Now, when she walks, she has a hitch in her step. And, when she hitches, she kicks the stump of her injured leg outward.
Step, step, hitch. Step, step, hitch.
One day, the female dog has puppies. And, her puppies do what all puppies do. They nurse. They watch. …
An intern pushed open the call room door so that twelve medical students could crowd their eager faces together to see where we might sleep for the next three years. Only a few months away from medical school herself, the intern acted as if sleeping in such quarters were second nature. She gestured to the fluffy quilts the residents had brought from home to adorn their beds and giggled about …
Medical oncologist, Dr. Ranjana Srivastava wrote on the subject on how doctors treat doctors may be medicine’s secret shame in the Guardian back in February 2015.
About a month later, vascular surgeon Dr. Gabrielle McMullin used a book launch speech to expose the problems of sexual harassment in the surgical profession. She highlighted a story of where a neurosurgical trainee had refused sexual advances and subsequent to launching a formal complaint, …
There are two, old, particularly nasty rumors, about cash and cancer. The first, which seems to be fading, is that scientists cured the disease long ago, but the pharmaceutical industry suppresses the cure so they can get rich selling worthless therapies. This never made sense to me, since the company or person that cures cancer will be rich beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. In addition, I have personally known several thousand …
“I’d like an MRI for my leg pain. I haven’t had an MRI for many years, and I’m worried.”
These were some of the first words I heard from a patient I was seeing for a new patient visit. Based on this patient’s story and physical exam, her pain was most consistent with a muscle strain. My preferred approach to manage this complaint was to ask the patient to rest her …
In psychology, the Lake Wobegon effect refers to a mythical town where “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” In other words, humans have a tendency to overestimate their capabilities, particularly in relation to others.
As a physician, I have yet to meet a fellow doc who didn’t think that their patients loved them or that they weren’t great clinicians. And …
One thing I learned early on as a doctor is different people have different tolerances for pain. At one end of the spectrum, for example, I recall a woman who came to the emergency department with a small splinter in her foot. She arrived wailing in pain, and we had to take her back to a treatment room ahead of other patients because her howling was scaring the people in …
I walked silently into the pristinely decorated room of the hospice facility and was greeted by her family. She lay there, not particularly responsive to her surroundings under the pressure and influences of metastatic stomach cancer. The warmness and smiles on the faces of her family told me that at some point and somehow, in the midst of actively witnessing the transition of their mother, aunt, sister, and grandmother, they …
Dear doctor:
Attached please find the medical records of Mr. Ron C., who is transferring medical care to your office. Ron is a 63-year-old gentleman with recurrent lung cancer, which has spread to his opposite lung and bones. There are multiple treatment choices for his disease, which we have discussed in detail. However, Ron is leaving my care, because he does not trust me.
As you are well aware, metastatic lung cancer …
Hospital cafeterias are important places. Great progress has been made over the last few years in raising the standard of the food served (to both patients and staff!), with much more emphasis too on making the options healthier and nutritious.
Speaking as someone who has worked in several different hospitals, and with my own general interest in health care quality and improving the patient experience, it’s always very interesting to look …
Studies show over and over again that empathy is the key to physician-patient communication and is directly related to patient satisfaction, adherence to medical treatment, lawsuits, and clinical outcomes. Yet despite its importance, many doctors still struggle with showing empathy.
The reality is that while most medical students start school with high levels of empathy, it doesn’t take long before that empathy is beaten out of us. Studies show …
I’ve been thinking about this over the last ten and a half years since my soul mate had a cardiac arrest and died. He was 38 and as fit as a fiddle. I am a rural general practitioner in South Australia (family practitioner in American parlance). He left behind four kids (from his previous relationship), and me with a broken heart. We had been together a little over two years.
Western …
Earlier this month I read a Wall Street Journal article about Zeynep Ton’s Good Jobs Index. Who is Zeynep Ton? She is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management who has ranked retailers on employee happiness. This was so positive. It was good to hear about businesses concerned about employee happiness and not just about profits and shareholders.
Two weeks later I was dismayed to …
My family was driving to see our new niece this past Saturday. While passing through a town on the way, we came upon a motorcycle accident. The rider had been hit by a vehicle and was lying on the pavement with a growing crowd of people who wanted to help. I’ve done it before. I did CPR at the scene of a wreck when I was in medical school, and …
Did it ever occur to some of today’s physicians that many people work awfully hard and complain a lot less than they do about “burnout” and “work-life balance”?
Did it ever occur to them that “work-life balance” is the very definition of a first-world problem, unique to a very privileged class of highly educated people, most of whom are white?
Every day, I go to work and see the example of the …
“I’m just the night doc,” you said. You said it with emphasis as if that explained everything and dismissed your incompetence, your lack of compassion, your failure to care. Unfortunately my sister was “just the patient,” who lay suffering hours before her death and the RN was “just the nurse” withholding the morphine that the daytime doctor had ordered for air hunger and agitation. The nurse called you in to …
A few weeks ago, after feeding my face with rich, dense chocolate cake brought by a truly awesome nurse (for no particular reason other than a warm and generous spirit), I walked back into a room to check on a post-cardiac arrest patient.
After surveying his vitals on the monitor, I turned my attention to two nurses and a pharmacist who were discussing the management of his six drips. He was …
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