 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: 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: 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: 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: DerrickT “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 the death of her mother. Her mother had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s dementia ten years earlier and had finally died after a short seven day stretch of refusing to eat or drink. Emily had debated whether or not to have a feeding tube placed in her mother’s stomach to keep her alive but ultimately decided doing so would only prolong her death rather than provide more meaningful, quality-filled days of life. Continue reading…  Photo: Fiona MacGinty 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 to wonder briefly if I’d developed acute appendicitis. However, by evening the pain had actually begun to improve so I dismissed the possibility; I’d never heard of a case of appendicitis resolving on its own without surgery. But mindful of the adage that the physician who treats himself has a fool for a patient, the next day I asked one of my physician friends to examine me. When he did, he found a fullness he didn’t like in my right lower quadrant and ordered a CT scan. To our mutual surprise, it showed that I had, in fact, developed acute appendicitis. Continue reading… |
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