Local Doc on the Block
This post has been dormant since March 29, 2016, but its title and its content have persistently been on my mind since. The other day at some social gathering someone asked me what my hobbies were and, after thinking for a moment, said that it was studying firearm violence. They laughed awkwardly…
Dwight and I sat in his small apartment and talked about our memories from Pine Street, the neighborhood we had first become friends and neighbors. He was grinning in a mischievous way and I knew something good was coming. “When I first met you, you were juggling outside, and I thought,” he paused to…
The nurse, the wife, the niece, and I sat together in the small family room, quietly thinking. I felt insulated from the sounds of the busy hospital even as my pager chirped a warning that our ICU was about to get even busier. I resisted the temptation to sit on the edge of the seat and betray the…
This is written as a public response to Jonathan Imbody, VP of Government Relations for CMDA, who recently wrote an opinion piece for a CMDA blog titled “Donald Trump got elected and now I don’t know what to think.” As he introduces: If that statement describes how you feel, you are a member…
This Monday our family went to the funeral of Uncle Ron, whom I barely knew. An uncle twice removed, we had met perhaps four times in life: his daughter’s wedding, my wedding, and two family reunions. Our conversations were brief but good. The first one was him telling me how…
What do you do with a dead body in the room? My first dead patient arrived that way. He was half naked, pupils blown, head bashed in from a car accident in which he was thrown through the windshield. It was my first week on the wards as a medical student and though…
I could hear the cussing from inside the room and noted the awkward glances of nearby nurses and staff who turned to look and gawk. Even though I only sat a few feet outside the door, I ignored the increasingly loud litany of expletives and deliberately focused on the screen in front of me. He was my patient and I…
In medical school we glossed over Freud because psychoanalysis had largely become outdated. Popular culture has turned his method into a mockery; we chuckle to think of the bearded psychiatrist listening intently to some dude reclining on a sofa talking at length about the hidden sexual meaning underlying his bedwetting dreams. In the new era of cognitive behavioral…
