Happiness in this World

Clark (not his real name) came to see me complaining of substernal chest pain.  At first, he said, it had come on only with exertion, but in the last two weeks it had begun to bother him at rest.  It radiated to his jaw and was associated with some mild nausea and sweating.  He’d been [...]

My student’s voice trembled as she answered my question.  “How do you think you’ve done so far?” I’d asked her.  We’d been together on the general medicine inpatient ward for two weeks—the midpoint of the rotation—and as was my usual custom I was giving her feedback on her performance by first asking her to rate [...]

The other day I found myself thinking about what would happen if as an adult I encountered some of the children who terrorized me when I was in 7th grade (an experience I wrote about in an earlier post, Breaking Free Of The Past), wondering if I’d be able to forgive them for what they [...]

For a doctor, every patient death is unpleasant.  My first thought when it happens to me is always, “What mistakes did I make?”  I go back through the sequence of events that led up to my patient’s death and ask myself if, given what I knew at each point along the way, I should have [...]

In seventh grade I once found myself in the school gym locker room changing before class when a group of my classmates began bullying a boy named Pino for having breasts (a condition called gynecomastia that sometimes occurs in young boys at puberty, usually resolving spontaneously).  I failed to rise to his defense, too afraid [...]

The other day I was out walking my son in his stroller (my now constant occupation) when a homeless woman approached me asking for money.  I’d seen her before in the neighborhood many times, including behind our condominium using drugs.  I turned down her request and continued walking, to my chagrin, as if the wind [...]

My patient smiled a toothless grin and told me, “I feel fine, doc.”  But he was far from it.  His liver enzymes had risen into the thousands, his skin was a pasty yellow I didn’t need the benefit of sunlight to see, and his albumin (a protein whose level indicates the liver’s functional capacity as [...]

In a previous post, Evil Triumphs When Good People Do Nothing, I argued that justice exists in the world only because good people stand up against injustice and that we should fight small injustices with as much fervor as we fight large ones.  Several commenters, however, suggested the anecdote I used at the beginning of the post was [...]

My heart began pounding as I listened to the sound of the dial tone in my ear.  After three rings a woman answered groggily and uncertainly, “H-hello?”
“Mrs. Peterson?” I asked.  My voice trembled slightly.  It was 2 a.m. and I’d awakened her from what I imagined had been a troubled sleep.
“Yes?”
“This is Dr. Lickerman.  I’m calling from the [...]