“Mrs. C**, how are you doing?”
She left the wheel chair in the waiting room, smiling “I’ll show you.”
She dances nimbly down the hallway to the exam room, having lost her forty pound apron a week ago. Her laughter is infectious.
“Let’s get rid of these drains.”
**Not her real name.
*This blog post was originally published at Suture for a Living*
I’m becoming an amateur archeologist. The hilltop where we live is strewn with arrowheads and bits of Native American pottery shards. I have slowly, surely, trained my eye to find them. There is little flint here; so most of the pieces I find were made of quartz. (Hard to work with, but remarkably beautiful and almost always a brilliant white.)
My kids and I walk the red-clay paths and look down for bits of stone protruding up, especially after a good, soaking rain. Elijah, my youngest boy, was the first to find one. ‘Is that an arrowhead, Papa?’ ‘Yep, good eye son!’ He had found what was probably the point of an atlatl (a kind of mix between arrow and spear).
We look for rocks that seem shaped by human hands. That’s the ticket; look for something that seems to suggest a purpose or a history. Things with no shape, no marks from being worked, are probably not worth our time. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at edwinleap.com*
Yesterday I introduced my friend Charles Roth. Charles was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in 2003 and was already in bad shape. He had been tested as healthy the previous year, but the disease struck quickly, hospitalizing him for a week and keeping him out of work for a month and a half. He returned to work but repeated illnesses due to AIDS meant that by 2006, he was unable to work full-time. A bank executive, Charles still tries to find occasional contract work or odd jobs like résumé writing and tax preparation, but with the recession, these jobs are low-paying and hard to come by. For the most part he makes do with a tiny state disability check and food stamps.
So how typical is Charles’s case? We’ve all heard of success stories like Magic Johnson, who was diagnosed with HIV in 1991 and still has not developed AIDS. But clearly neither case tells the whole story. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Daily Monthly*
On the way to the funeral you wonder how you’ll be received by the grieving. Although you are confident that your care for the deceased was sincere, professional, and adept, you still question if others will so assume. There is silence in the car. This is a trip you make alone.
You manage a bitter smile as you recall stories the patient shared in unguarded moments, behind the door of a small examining room. How he beamed with content at the thought of his grandchildren; how her eyes glowed as she remembered the view from the Eiffel Tower; how the tears and sobs and memories of a lost child wracked his otherwise impenetrable façade. Sometimes you knew his spirit as well as you knew his medical illnesses, and often he hoped you would tend more to the former. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Examining Room of Dr. Charles*
“Hey doc,” the patients says, “I think I got wax in my ear.” I reply, “Well, that makes it hard to hear me, then, huh?” “WHAT?” – the patient yells. Oh yeah, I say to myself. “I’ve been having this ever since I was a kid. Every few months, I need my ears cleaned out.” So, I look in there, and it’s the most amount of wax I’ve seen in a long time.
“Sir, do you use q-tips to clean our your ears?” I ask the patient. “Well, yeah, I think I’ve been doing a good job at keeping things clean, don’t you think?” “Well, I wouldn’t recommend that because it looks like you’ve been pushing the wax further in there.” “WHAT?”
So, we’re able to get some of the wax out of there only to find a lot of redness and irritation in the ear canal. “Doc, I still can’t hear. Are you sure that you got all the wax out of there?” “Well, sir, there is no more wax in there now. It looks like there is an infection underneath, and that’s what causing the problem now.” “WHAT?” Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Doctor Anonymous*
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