Sharing personal experiences of giving and receiving health care
Powerless
“I know it wasn’t really your fault, but I blame you on some level,” said my patient Aisha, sounding husky over the phone. “I’m working on forgiving you, but I’m not there yet.”
Tears sprang to my eyes, but I kept my voice steady as I replied, “I understand. I’m sorry about my role in what happened. Please let me know if you ever feel ready to come back to see me, but I can refer you to another doctor in the meantime.”
What had I done to deserve such harsh words? I hadn’t prevented her traumatic childbirth experience.
Our Shared Journey
Editor’s Note: This piece was awarded an honorable mention in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”
It took a terrifying and life-changing experience of being different for me to realize a fundamental truth: I’m the same as everyone else.
This truth has redefined my goals and reshaped the way I practice medicine.
At age twenty-nine, during my third and final year of internal-medicine residency, I received a diagnosis of a rare and malignant brain cancer called anaplastic astrocytoma. Quite suddenly, I was different.
ICU Surprise!
It was 7:15 on a Tuesday morning. What kind of a Tuesday morning, I could not say. How would I know? There are no windows on 8 North, the adolescent ward at Bellevue Hospital, where I was spending my first month as an intern. There could have been a hurricane outside for all I knew.
What I did know was that in about fifteen minutes a pack of fresh, smiling faces would be arriving, and one of them would bring me breakfast: a toasted bagel with cream cheese and coffee. The long night (or should I say nightmare) was ending, and I could look forward to an easy eight remaining hours of work and then sleep, blissful sleep.
More Voices
Every month readers tell their stories — in 40 to 400 words — on a different healthcare theme.
The Biopsy
March 2024
Cold
February 2024
COVID Redux
January 2024
New Voices
Stories by those whose faces and perspectives are underrepresented in media and in the health professions.
The Sounds of Inclusion
Editor’s Note: This piece was awarded an honorable mention in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”
The whir of a drill. Loud smacks from a hammer. Tools scrape and scratch the floor as they’re shuffled across it.
To you, these may seem like the sounds of nondescript carpentry work; maybe a remodel happening in a neighboring apartment. But as I sit at my desk in my medical school’s laboratory, listening to that carpentry symphony two lab benches away, I hear the sounds of inclusion.
Being Different: My Struggle and My Motivation
Editor’s Note: This piece was a finalist in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”
When I was in elementary school, I was bullied by my peers into believing that being different was bad.
I grew up thinking that speaking my mind was undesirable if my thoughts didn’t mirror those of others. To my peers, liking the “strange” foods of my parents’ Haitian cuisine, such as tripe or oxtail, was weird. I wore my older brothers’ hand-me-downs, which led to incessant teasing at school.
Although I grew up in Brockton, Massachusetts—a mostly Black, Haitian and Cape Verdean town—much of this
Black in Medicine
Editor’s Note: This piece was a finalist in the Pulse writing contest, “On Being Different.”
I was a third-year medical student, anxiously waiting for our morning conference to begin and quickly reviewing the questions that might be asked.
I had stepped into the conference room full of residents a few minutes prior, timidly asking if this was the correct location. An attending physician I’d met only once confirmed that I was in the right place and directed me to the front row of seats. As I sat down, I realized that I was the only medical student present. Fighting the urge to bolt from the room, I pulled
Poems
Prognosis
Small birds teeter
on the wires by the feedstore.
Crows scatter broken seedpods
beneath the streetlight.
Flowering weeds crowd the dusty sidewalk,
sickly yellow or red as blood.
Brain Scan
I slide into the MRI machine.
Sleds slide downhill, propelled by their own weight;
my movement’s horizontal, made through means
outside of my control: a man in green
scrubs bops a button, turning me to freight
that’s fed into the MRI machine.
Song of the Body
You wake up in pain, again.
That thoracic disc twisting in on itself
like a corkscrew unable
to spiral back out of the pulp.
It’s work make-believing
your way through the long week,
bearing someone else’s dreams
on your employed shoulders.
Haiku
- Garry Gay
- 08 March 2024
recovery room LATEST
- David Oates
- 23 February 2024
deathbed vigil
- Joanna Ashwell
- 09 February 2024
the same faces
- Mary McCormack
- 26 January 2024
asking where
- Meredith Ackroyd
- 12 January 2024
wide open sky
- Ryland Shengzhi Li
- 29 December 2023
winter night
Visuals
- JM Huck
- 15 March 2024
Stress Operation LATEST
- Marge Brady
- 01 March 2024
Dawn
- Margo Stutts Toombs
- 16 February 2024
Beat Heart
- Alan Blum
- 02 February 2024
Remembering My Patients…
- Megan Young
- 19 January 2024
A Head Above
- Margaret Kim Peterson
- 05 January 2024