 THE UNDEFEATED MIND Fall 2012 |
 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 of late middle-age health when he began rapidly losing weight. Continue reading…  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 supported the notion that it’s difficult to be happy without liking oneself. But how can one learn to like oneself when one doesn’t? Continue reading…  Photo: fontplaydotcom I’ve chosen three questions from readers to discuss in this week’s post. To those who sent me these questions, please recognize my answers are by necessity general as I obviously don’t know you personally nor the details of the situations you wrote about. I do hope my answers can provide you new ways to think about the problems you’re facing as well as provide other readers useful perspectives on similar situations they may be facing in their own lives, but please don’t mistake any of the following for my professional medical advice. Continue reading…  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,” someone, a woman, said. Continue reading…  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 yet, this interconnectedness, while wonderful, hasn’t come without cost. Continue reading…  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 sweating. He’d been a pack-a-day smoker for 35 years, had hypertension and diabetes, and a family history of premature heart disease. Continue reading…  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 her to rate her performance herself. Continue reading…  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 them for what they did to me. I’d like to think I would, but the truth is I’m not sure. As a result, I found myself thinking about the nature of forgiveness and of the power and value of being able to forgive. Continue reading…  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, I should have thought differently, acted differently or more quickly, or called for help sooner. Only once I finish this exercise and I’ve thoroughly assured myself my patient didn’t die, or even die sooner than he or should would have, because of me can I then move on to grieve for the person that was lost. Continue reading…  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 to his defense, too afraid at the time to have their malevolent attention redirected toward me, but remember feeling awful for Pino and wondering how anybody could be so effortlessly cruel. Continue reading… |
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