Happiness in this World

One day, about a year and a half ago, my wife and I were walking along a street near our home when she grabbed my arm and suddenly exclaimed, “I think that woman is in trouble!”
I followed her gaze to a car stopped at a light and saw to my horror a woman being prevented [...]

It seems almost every few months a story of a child abduction saturates the news.  Amber alerts occur several times a year in many localities.  Stories of children who vanished years or even decades past re-run every so often as reminders that some families remain locked in grief even as the rest of us have [...]

“The absolute truth, Dr. Lickerman?” Emily (not her real name) said to me, tears sliding down her red, swollen cheeks.  “It was a relief.”
She wasn’t referring to being fired from a job she secretly despised or having a divorce finalized from a husband she no longer loved.  She was describing instead how she felt about [...]

In January of 2007, I developed a mild stomach ache and general feeling of being unwell while at a Sunday brunch.  Initially, the pain sat in the center of my abdomen just above my belly button, but gradually over the course of the day inched its way down into my right lower quadrant, causing me [...]

I remember when I first read the pathology report on my patient, Mr. Jackson (not his real name), my stomach flip-flopped.  “Adenocarncinoma of the pancreas” it said.  A week later, a CT scan revealed the cancer had already spread to his liver.  Two months after that, following six rounds of chemotherapy, around-the-clock morphine for pain, a deep vein [...]