Even after all this time, the phone calls aren’t always easy to make.
“Hi, Mrs. Smith, this is Dr. Kass at camp, don’t worry, everything is OK.” I usually get that out in one breath, then immediately transition to concrete details. “It’s a finger. It might be broken.” It doesn’t matter if I’m calling about a cough, a fever or a bite from the camp pet pig — I know that …
Recently, my friend had a patient. The guy, patient with a history of autoimmune disease came in with pain, anxiety, and tachycardia. She walked in and felt the psychosomatic overlay. What was her intervention? Meds? Psych? Nope.
She closed the door, held his hand, pulled out her mom self and let him tell her for 15 long minutes about his hard life. The nurse watched the monitor as his heart rate dropped in …
5 a.m. on a Friday morning, during a lull in my overnight shift, I got a text from my friend Julie (name changed).
“Steve had a massive heart attack.”
Me back: “OMG, what happened.”
Julie: “Not sure, he called my mom, he thought he was going to die. Now they are doing a CT scan.”
And so it went on. As I waded through the information, Julie thought she understood I realized that she …
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