|
Photo: Tim Green When I was an intern in internal medicine, I admitted a patient to my service with pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer is a bad one; back then, only ten percent of patients with it would be alive within five years after being diagnosed. My patient was a farmer in the full bloom [...] Photo: erix! Some people have the misfortune to have been born to abusive parents who belittled them and prevented them from developing a healthy self-esteem. Others are born predisposed to view themselves in a negative light because of their physical appearance, a disability, or for no reason anyone, including themselves, knows. Research has consistently [...] Photo: simminch Once while I was jogging along Lake Michigan, I came upon a large crowd surrounding a middle-aged man lying supine on the ground. I stopped to assess the scene and saw the man wasn’t moving—at all. Two people were bending over him and trying to shake him awake. “What happened?” I asked. “He fell,” [...] Photo: Steve Keys Email, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Delicious, Digg, LinkedIn, blogs (of course), and scores of others—all part of the new and wonderful ways we can now connect with one another electronically, each with its own culture and unique set of rules. In one sense, the planet has never been more interconnected. And [...] Photo: robertdx 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 [...] Photo: said&done 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 [...] Photo: Hamed Saber 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 [...] Photo: Richard0 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, [...] Photo: Pink Sherbet Photography 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 [...] Photo: pedrosimones7 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 [...] |
||
|
Copyright © 2010 Happiness in this World - All Rights Reserved
|
||
