As a child, I hated working in the garden. Gardening in those days meant pulling up weeds and chucking rocks from my parents’ ever-increasing vegetable patch in the back yard of our home, which was situated on a bench at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains in northern Utah. This bench had long ago been [...]
1. Really sick people usually don’t have many complaints. They are too sick to. Whether because of illness or trauma, people with life-and-death kinds of problems usually don’t complain much. They are either unconscious or all their energy is focused on staying alive.
2. The converse is also true: people who [...]
I was living in Boston in the fall of 1992 When Bill Clinton was running for president against the first George Bush. In the final days before the election, he made a campaign sweep through the country that included Boston’s Faneuil Hall, only a few blocks from where I lived. Eager to see [...]
I have found myself thinking about an episode from ER a lot in the last couple of weeks. The Mark Green character, played by Anthony Edwards, is dying of a brain tumor and working his final shifts. In the episode I am remembering, there is a scene where he takes care of a [...]
A couple of weeks ago, I took care of Mrs. S., an 81-year-old woman who was brought to the Emergency Department by ambulance because of trouble breathing. With a host of medical problems and fragile baseline health, in the few days prior to our meeting, she had gotten even sicker: what started as a cough [...]