The pediatrician kept on telling me that everything was fine. What could possibly be wrong? His motor skills were right on time, if not a little early. He even had emerging problem-solving skills. He did things like push a chair up to a shelf to climb up and get what he wanted. Three decades later, he still does clever things that make me question why he is so impaired.
Unfortunately, there …
The afternoon that I went for a walk with Linda* for the first time was one of the moments I’ve been proudest of as a hospice volunteer, odd though that may seem.
I’d first met Linda a few months prior to that, when the late fall and winter light made her and her husband Joseph’s small and cluttered apartment dark in the early afternoons. I was there mainly to visit Joseph, …
You are there to help bring a new life into the world, comforting and reassuring new parents.
You are there in the middle of the night to return a call to a distraught mom whose child is running a high fever and is panicked.
You are there to encourage and instruct a diabetic heart patient who wants to make changes in his life and who looks to you for guidance.
You are there …
Access to care, patient advocacy, health disparities: These are all buzzwords in health care now. We, as health care providers, understand that we must do the best for our patients in the hopes of providing a positive outcome. So, despite our perceptions that we may be doing a good job, we may find ourselves in a bad position. Or worse, causing significant pain to those we have vowed to protect.
I …
Jacob is just past 30 by a year or two. He is, as I like to describe him, a little boy trapped inside a man’s body and very much mentally ill. He started off with fetal alcohol syndrome, which means his mother drank heavily when she was pregnant. I am not sure I believe that diagnosis is correct, by the way. Fetal alcohol syndrome is a much more complicated condition …
Comical cartoons about medicine and doctors help to alleviate patient fears, make doctors laugh, nurses think, and everyone else involved in the medical field ponder the value of comics. I have been involved in creating medical cartoons for 40+ years and have created custom cartoons for doctors and hospitals. Have you ever looked at a poster in a doctor’s office and felt …
As people, we often have multiple stories to tell, from different perspectives. Multiple stories and perspectives can be wed or braided together around the same themes. Here we braid together two separate perspectives of a patient author and a physician author, respectively.
From both perspectives, this is a story about the power of care, cancer, and quality of life.
Following my cancer diagnosis of nodal marginal zone lymphoma, I struggled with my …
I am a firm believer that medicine is best practiced as a team, with the one undergoing treatment at the center participating fully. It’s a belief embedded in the multidisciplinary care model. I have been fortunate to have been exposed to multidisciplinary clinics in my fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and have worked …
Victor Frankl is an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor, who survived three years in the concentration camps of Dachau and Auschwitz.
He once told a story about a woman, his patient, who called him in the middle of the night saying that she wants to commit suicide. Viktor Frankl kept her on the phone, giving her many reasons to keep on living, until she promised not to take her life. …
Lying in a hospital bed while awaiting heart surgery, I looked at my teen daughter and my parents, then smugly pointed out the irregular slashes on the cardiac monitor.
“See these?” I said. “They’re called PVCs. My doctor is going to fix them. Make them all go away.”
The asymmetrical rhythm, a frequent and annoying pattern of multiple skipped heartbeats, had plagued me for the last three years, despite my swearing off …
There is a haze lurking overhead clouding rational thinking. Thoughts wander back to times when my body was unencumbered, and I felt nothing was out of my grasp. Maybe that was an unrealistic thought, but it is how youth and inexperience protect one from the somewhat harsh realities of growing older.
Coming to terms with chronic health conditions is perplexing. There are days when everything goes just right. The sun is …
Some weeks ago, this writer visited with a friend who had been admitted to an inpatient psychiatric unit of a New York hospital. The friend had been there for a few weeks. Other patients have been there for longer.
After spending approximately an hour with his friend, this writer was not allowed to leave the unit at the conclusion of his visit. It wasn’t until 15 minutes later that one of …
I was an RN for more than 40 years and am now retired. As a recent hospital patient, I documented my experiences. This resulted in a letter to nurses everywhere.
***
Dear Nurse,
Please be kind to me. I am frightened, alone, and in pain. I am way out of my comfort zone and need every bit of encouragement you have to offer.
I arrived at the emergency room a short while ago, was …
I’m a patient and consumer advocate who has dedicated my career to improving the health care system. I’ve encountered the good, the bad, and the ugly of our health care system, but I was still not prepared for what I heard in April 2016 when I attended my first national medical association conference and listened to a resident share his experience with severe depression. He spoke about a never-ending list …
From a planning perspective, Wolfgang Balzer is the perfect health care consumer.
Balzer, an engineer, knew for several years he had a hernia that would need to be repaired, but it wasn’t an emergency, so he waited until the time was right.
The opportunity came in 2018 after his wife, Farren, had given birth to their second child in February. The couple had met their deductible early in the year and figured …
I’ve been living with chronic pain for more than a decade.
It began in 2009 with nerve damage after emergency groin surgery. Four years later, I fell and hit my head. That fall led to a constant headache, a whistling sound in my ear, back and hip pain, tingling and numbness in my hands and feet, electrical shocks …
Take one-half tablet three times per day with meals, increasing by half each week until reaching a maximum of three tablets three times per day.
Did you get a new prescription from your doctor? If so, there is a 50 percent chance you will not adhere to label directions. Either the instructions are too complicated, the drugs are too expensive, you do not like the way the medicine makes you feel …
Let’s get right to it: This is an apology letter to frontline clinicians. And a call to action.
I’m a patient advocate, and I’ve spent most of the last 20 years fighting for patient- and family-centered care in national laws and regulations, and in local practice. Prioritizing the needs of patients and families above all else. It is meaningful work to which I feel deeply called, and it is hard work …
As I was scrolling through my Facebook feed one morning, I noticed an article with a title starting with: “When Doctors are Wrong” with a picture of a newborn baby with a breathing tube in the NICU. I immediately opened the article and started reading it with interest because my baby also looked this way, so tiny, in the NICU, with lots of tubes all covering her little body.
As I …
An excerpt from My Beautiful Detour: An Unthinkable Journey from Gutless to Grateful.
Managing chronic illness can leave a person susceptible to emotional and mental health issues that can further exacerbate their physical symptoms. Post-traumatic stress disorder can often accompany managing a physical illness, and often is the …
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