When I was a preemie — all two-and-a-half pounds of me — my mom was understandably worried. She said her doctor wheeled her down the hall to the newborn nursery, and my mom could hear me screaming all the way down the hall. She said, “I’ve got to hand it to you. You let your voice be heard — you let your needs be known. I told her that at …
Silence isn’t golden when it comes to health
An excerpt from How to Be Sick: A Buddhist-Inspired Guide for the Chronically Ill and Their Caregivers (Second Edition). Copyright 2018 by Toni Bernhard. Excerpted with permission from Wisdom Publications.
In the years since I’ve been chronically ill, more essential to me than formal meditation has been mindfulness outside of …
The present moment as a refuge
Are my breast cancer and I on the wrong side of statistics, or just caught in the confusing and potentially devastating conflict between medical societies about when women should start breast-cancer screening?
One morning more than a year ago, it didn’t seem like either. As both of my kids cuddled in bed with my husband and me, I …
When breast cancer screening guidelines conflict: Some patients face real consequences
An excerpt from How to Be Sick: A Buddhist-Inspired Guide for the Chronically Ill and Their Caregivers (Second Edition). Copyright 2018 by Toni Bernhard. Excerpted with permission from Wisdom Publications.
The fifth way I cultivate compassion for myself is to consciously work on opening my heart to the intense emotions …
Open your heart to your suffering
A excerpt from A Mind Unraveled: A Memoir. Copyright © 2018 by Kurt Eichenwald. Published by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
I awoke in pain. Sometime during a seizure, I had fallen down the stairs outside of …
What the medical profession can learn from this patient
As a patient who has had extensive dealings with five prestigious Manhattan medical institutions, I have taken the liberty of writing this letter from the perspective of one who has spent many long and arduous years in the underbelly of our deeply troubled health care system, and one who has seen firsthand how the doctor-patient relationship has steadily eroded over time. This relationship, so foundational to the practice of medicine, …
A patient’s open letter to aspiring physicians
A thought, a word, a story. Simple concepts in a complex world, but they can have a profound effect on how we live our lives. Today’s world may seem, at times, a blur. We are inundated every day with headlines of natural disasters, man’s inhumanity to man, and simply, just life slapping us in the face. How can we maintain a sense of sanity and security when the world around …
Informed consent is the cornerstone of medical ethics. And every physician must defend this sacred principle from every form of evil that would seek to dismantle, degrade and debase it. If informed consent is the sun, then privacy, confidentiality, dignity, and trust are planets that go around it. For without informed consent, the descent of health care into amorality is inevitable, and the doctor-patient relationship is doomed to ruination, oblivion, …
The dismantling of informed consent is a disaster
I sit before you and others like you, in silence, anxious about what I might be told. You deliver a litany of questions to my countenance as I sit in a chair beside you. Your attention is diverted to the cold and detached computer screen where my responses are entered without you ever noticing the fear in my eyes. There is no acknowledgment to indicate a level of understanding of …
One day I found out that it was National Limerick Day. I didn’t even know there was a National Limerick Day. I investigated other “days” and found out that September 7th was National Grateful Patient Day. So, this grateful patient will start her post with a limerick:
There was a patient in a flimsy gown,
Who was also wearing a frown.
She was getting a bad cold,
And feeling cold and old,
She wanted another …
Happy National Grateful Patient Day!
Darkness covers the sky so that no light can enter the soul. Only a silhouette of life is possible — only a shell devoid of existence, devoid of meaningful experiences. Living is like walking in a dense forest where its canopy envelopes all who dare to enter. The falling rain is black. It covers everything like a shroud. The air is so heavy, breathing is, at times, too much to …
Physicians are at the frontline of depression
After many years of being mostly housebound by chronic illness (which includes chronic pain), here are a few of the dilemmas I’ve faced over and over. I’m confident that I’m not alone in my “should I/shouldn’t I?” world.
Do I accept an invitation from a friend to get together or do I refuse it?
If I refuse the invitation, depending on who issued it, it may be the last one I’ll receive …
Should I or shouldn’t I? The dilemmas faced by the chronically ill.
What if it is your parent? Your spouse? Your child?
Imagine supporting a loved one through a journey of serious illness. You go to all the appointments, know all the medications, almost feel the aches and pains as if they were our own. You repeat the same thing over and over again to one doctor after another making sure nothing slips through the cracks. Did somebody write this down? Isn’t this …
Caregivers have the power to prevent medical error
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If one more person tells me to be sure to take care of myself, I’m going to bury my face in a pillow and scream.
“Go for a walk, take a vacation,” they advise. I know they’re trying to help, but really? Giving me one more thing to do? Oh well, they’re just doing the best they can.
I moved my folks across the country, from Florida to Washington State, and into …
The caregiver’s mantra: doing the best I can
I remember reciting a phrase during my childhood that goes something like this, “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.” So as I would walk back and forth to school, I would make a conscious effort to avoid any and all cracks in the sidewalks for fear of bringing unwarranted harm to my mother. This was a pretty difficult task to accomplish since in my small hometown, cracks in …
Don’t let fear harm your health
Generally speaking, patients and physicians are working towards good health. While many patient expectations can be unreasonable, others are practical; this article amalgamates them. Can you identify the absurd demands?
But multiply half of the listed expectations by hundreds or thousands of patients, and we begin to understand why there is such a high rate of physician burnout. Bilateral empathy lowers expectations.
Bedside manner. Don’t accept a walk-in patient and leave us waiting …
Bilateral empathy lowers patient expectations
To complement Aaron Lacy’s post on treating colleagues with respect, I’d like to expand that concept to include treating patients with respect too. That means if a patient says she’s freezing, and adding insult to injury, has been sick as well, adjust the thermostat a little, please, even if you as the doctor isn’t cold. When a stray cat came to our door in the dead of winter, …
Let’s order a round of respect: for both patients and physicians
I agree wholeheartedly with a post by Annahieta Kalantari expressing the idea that finding a new physician job is like dating. A patient looking for a new MD can be just as uncertain, unnerving, intimidating and stressful.
First, you hear the dreaded words from a receptionist, often sorrowfully saying, “I’m sorry, we’re not in your network this year.” Then, the nerves begin. Maybe a friend recommends a doctor …
Finding a new doctor is like dating
Announce to friends that you have cancer, and they will probably react with sympathy and compassion. Tell them that you’ve broken your leg, and they’ll offer to get your groceries and drive you to medical appointments.
Share that you suffer from depression — and the sound of silence will fill your head.
Depression has been my companion for as long as I can remember. My maternal grandmother, who immigrated to this country …
Why do we say “curiosity killed the cat?”
Isn’t curiosity what drives people to ask insightful questions? To keep an open mind? And to continue learning at age 6 or 60, alike?
Curiosity is what sets apart people who are fixed in their opinions and beliefs and those who adjust in light of new information. Recently, I read an article in The New Yorker that suggested that Donald Trump doesn’t read books …
What does curiosity have to do with patient safety?
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