New posts are available every Monday and can be read in under 5 minutes.
|
Posted by Alex Lickerman  Print  Email to a friend  While I was growing up, my brothers (I’m the eldest of four boys—I know: my poor mother) often chided me for being so much like my father. I suppose it was inevitable that I would be; firstborn children tend to be rule followers (if you believe in the significance of birth order) and I fit the stereotype. Some boys use their fathers to push against as they struggle to establish their own independent identities. I used mine as a role model.
My decision to do this was largely, though not entirely, unconscious. Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  My wife and I vividly remember the anesthesiologist’s statement: “You may feel a little pressure.” She spoke the word gently, as if to imply that’s how it would feel, and we believed her. Epidural blocks, she explained, don’t numb the sacral nerve roots that deliver sensation from the pelvic floor so my wife would likely feel something as she entered the last stage of labor and our son began passing through her birth canal. But we were both reassured. A mild bit of pressure seemed no threat to our hope of having the same experience my sister-in-law had with her first child: she’d had to be told when to push at the final moments because she couldn’t feel anything at all. Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Photo: Jayel Aheram When I was in grammar school learning about World War II, I remember thinking how grateful I was that society had finally matured to the point in the intervening years that war no longer ever broke out. Today I can hardly remember what bizarre thought process led me to conclude that people had actually become less barbaric with time. I do remember I also believed racial prejudice had died out decades ago and that the pronouncement of guilt or innocence by our justice system reflected actual guilt or innocence. Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Photo: totalAldo I love what I do. Being a doctor challenges me every day to think critically and creatively, to learn new things, and to make the vast machine that is the American medical system run smoothly. The relationships I’ve formed provide me great power to do good: my patients trust me like no one else in their lives, which gives me enormous influence over their decisions (which, of course, also provides equal opportunity to do harm). Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  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…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Photo: jurvetson We’re all meaning-seeking creatures, rousing ourselves up out of bed on different days for different reasons—one day to pass a test, the next to help a troubled friend, the next to run errands—but always motivated to participate in each day by some kind of purpose. But if we plumb deeply enough into our hearts, excavating down to the most elemental parts of ourselves, invariably we’ll find only one purpose—a mission, if you will—sitting firmly embedded there, a mission against which we measure the value of everything we do. Whether we’ve consciously assigned this mission to ourselves or we’ve unconsciously accepted someone else’s assignment to us, exactly what it is matters more than almost anything in life. Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Last week my 18 month-old son, Cruise, started Montessori preschool. The first three days my wife and I dropped him off he cried so hard he could hardly catch his breath, his chest heaving in great racking sobs. By the fourth day, however, we were listening to him repeat his teacher’s name every few minutes on the way over, and when we dropped him off and gently prodded him into the classroom, he entered, stood, stuck his thumb in his mouth, and stared curiously at all the other toddlers crying around him. When we came to pick him up at the end of the day, we watched him through the classroom’s observation windows sitting in a little toddler chair eating a piece of cantaloupe with the other toddlers, also in chairs, and drinking juice out of a plastic cup by himself for the very first time. Rather than burst into tears when he saw us realizing we’d been separated from him all day, he ran up to me, wrapped his arms around mine, and smiled. Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  In 1979, as I was about to enter seventh grade, my parents moved our family from one suburb of Chicago to another where we soon discovered anti-Semitism ran rampant. Changing schools for any boy of thirteen is traumatic enough, but finding myself persecuted verbally and physically for belonging to a particular religion made the transition so awful that by the end of the year my parents felt compelled to move our family back to the original suburb from which we’d come. Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Photo: Snake3yes Several weeks ago, my now 15-month-old son developed a fever to 103.5 F. Usually a champion sleeper, that night he woke several times with a frenetic look in his eyes and a jerkiness to his movements that frankly unnerved me. The heat coming off his little febrile body almost made me start sweating myself. He had no other symptoms to suggest the cause of his fevers, and even though our pediatrician had been reassuring when I’d called early in the day (“fevers in kids are a dime a dozen”), my doctor brain was kicking in full-blast with worry over it’s cause. Continue reading…
Posted by Alex Lickerman Print Email to a friend  Photo: Bohman One of my patients suffers from chronic constipation due to irritable bowel syndrome. During the literally twenty years since she was first diagnosed, her symptom pattern has remained remarkably consistent: she has perhaps 1-2 bowel movements per week, occasionally accompanied by some mild cramping. Even she admits the symptoms are more a bother than a worry. And yet, every time I prescribe a new medicine for one of her other ailments, within a day or two she calls me up complaining that it’s causing her to become constipated. When I ask if she means that while on the new medicine she has fewer bowel movements or more abdominal pain, her answer is always no. Continue reading…
|
|
