Local Doc on the Block
[Originally written for the Emerging Scholars Network blog, but you can see it earlier here. You should really check it out some day!] For its cover story last month, Christianity Today published an article on contemporary Radicalism. The article struck me as controversial and provocative because it held out criticism of...
[This was originally written years ago for a Christian campus publication, Revisions. It is one of my favorite reflections and will appear on the ESN blog tomorrow.] The patient came in for a refill of pain medications even though it was his first visit to the family medicine practice. The front...
I got up before the alarm yesterday even though my sleep was fitful and restless. Though it was hard for me to know for sure, I was fairly certain that a series of gunshots had woken me up in the middle of the night, and that what had followed was...
“Who are you going to jump?” I asked sharply. “Look me in the eye and tell me.” He couldn’t do it. We kept talking in circles, getting more and more frustrated. There was big talk earlier about it, about banding together with friends to beat up some kid. I had...
This author is DM, a nurse practitioner living in North Philadelphia, and one of the sources of living inspiration for what I am doing now. This is part of our Displacement series. If you would like to contribute a story of your own, send an e-mail to submissions@theurbanresident.com. — Whenever...
We were sitting around the peeled and cracking table, chatting late into the night. It has become a common occurrence in our small dining room to see an eclectic mix of people perched on different pieces of our patchwork furniture, trading stories and snippets about what it means to believe...
I am not exactly sure of what prompted me to do it, but I began keeping a tally of all the pronouncements I have done. I never really knew this before, but pronouncements are done in a remarkably simple and impersonal way. Most patients who die in the hospital do...
“I thought I could beat the ICU, you know?” My resident looked into the distance abstractly as he spoke, talking more to himself than to me. “Sometimes you think you won’t let it get you down, but you can’t. It always wins.” I wondered what he meant by winning. Did...
