 THE UNDEFEATED MIND Fall 2012 |
 Photo: beatplusmelody Human beings are the only living creatures endowed with a full awareness of their mortality, a wound so painful that they’re driven to pull every cognitive trick in the book to deny it. As with any skill, some of us are far better at this than others, yielding a wide range of conscious reactions to the notion of personal non-being. Continue reading…  Photo: rjhuttondfw The notion that dying is a right seems nonsensical to argue: death is given to all of us equally without the need of anyone’s sanction. The right to die well, on the other hand—well, that’s another matter entirely. A good death is, in many cases, something our fellow human beings have great power to grant or deny, and is therefore, sadly, a right for which we must indeed fight. Continue reading…  Photo: 28misguidedsouls When I was a resident working in the intensive care unit (the ICU) at the University of Iowa, one of my responsibilities was to communicate with the family members of my patients. However, an intensive care unit, as its name suggests, is an intensely busy place, and I often observed among my colleagues a tendency to think about communicating with families as the last thing on their list of things to do. And though I too often found myself making it the last task of my day, I tried to make it a consistent one, knowing, as I did, that not knowing is perhaps even more anxiety producing than knowing that something is bad. Continue reading…  Photo: Albion Europe ApS I’ve taken care of many patients with cancer throughout my career, but one in particular stands out in my mind, a forty-year-old journalist who came to me with a diagnosis of a grade IV glioblastoma—a malignant brain tumor with an almost uniformly fatal prognosis. The reason I remember him so vividly isn’t just because he was nearly my age, or because, like me, he had a wife, a three-year-old toddler, and loved to write, but because of something he told me at our second visit. “Hope,” he said, “is the one thing standing between me and peace.” Continue reading…  Photo: The U.S. Army A relative of mine recently died, so my parents, my brothers, and I went to his funeral. The rabbi was appropriately somber and talked about him fondly, as if she’d known him (though she hadn’t). His sister and brother stood up and told us all how much they loved him and already missed him. Tears were shed and hugs exchanged. Continue reading…  Photo: Nicholas_T “When do we stop?” my patient’s son asked me. “That’s really hard to know,” I answered. We were discussing when to stop making interventions in hopes of trying to save his father’s life. He’d been diagnosed with a severe gastrointestinal bleed from a stomach ulcer. Continue reading…  Photo: aspearing When I was a first-year resident, I admitted a 34-year-old HIV-positive man to my inpatient general medicine service for fevers. On physical exam, I found a large lesion on his right retina near the macula (the retina’s center). I called up an infectious disease specialist, who confirmed what I’d suspected: he had CMV retinitis. Continue reading…  Photo: b1ubb I’ve never had a patient confess to having had a near-death experience (NDE), but recently I came across a fascinating book called The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain by Kevin Nelson, M.D. that reports as many as 18 million Americans may have had one. If true, the odds are not only that some of my patients have been among them, but also some of my friends. Which got me wondering: just what does science have to tell us about their cause? Continue reading…  Photo: A6U571N Several years ago, a graduating medical school class invited me to be a guest at their graduation dinner. A resident with whom I’d worked previously had also been invited and was scheduled to speak. When the time came for her to make her remarks, she began by telling a story of a former mentor of hers who, she said, had once told her, “Someone is always watching you.” Continue reading…  Photo: wsilver Several years ago, my wife and I had to put down one of our cats. Minnie was really my wife’s cat, having journeyed with her from Vancouver to Chicago almost a decade earlier. At some point during that time Minnie had developed a urinary tract infection that had damaged her kidneys. After that, according to my wife, her personality changed. By the time I met her, Minnie was no longer friendly and affectionate but somewhat aloof and disdainful (and, yes, I know this is the baseline personality of many otherwise healthy cats). Continue reading… |
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