More Than Four Sides

Category: Medicine

  • Training Week

    (Written on Monday, but not sent, as I got hit by a wave of jet lag): We did our first day of training today. I didn’t bring a camera, so no photos, but I surely will tomorrow. Our small group of 6 joined several larger groups of trainees, for a total of about 50 people,…

  • A New Adventure…

    Today I spent my first day orienting at Partners In Health, in Boston.  In three days, I and my 1/2 dozen new colleagues, and fellow adventurers, will be travelling to Sierra Leone, to assist with eradicating the remaining Ebola outbreak that was so much in the news last summer and fall (and has so remarkably…

  • End of life – no discussion

    Right after I had the encounter I described a few weeks ago, I received an email with terrible news. The email included a scanned hand-written letter – a farewell letter to family and friends. The writer of this letter is someone I have known for most of my life – a vibrant, lively, intelligent person…

  • End-of life discussion, part two-B

    I forgot to add, in my last post, a description of the last encounter I had with the husband, Ted, at the end of our visit that day. We had done our examination of Eleanor’s wound, and the nurse was repacking the wound-vac dressing which was helping in the healing process.  I stepped out of…

  • End-of-life discussion, part two

    I started a post about “End of Life Discussions”, and it’s taken me awhile to get back to it.  Life got busy.  But the thoughts have persisted… So, I was sitting in a clinic exam room with my patient, we’ll call her Eleanor, and her husband, we’ll call him Ted.  And I launched into my pitch:…

  • Discussing end-of-life decisions

    Every now and then, in my work as a physician, I have to broach the topic of impending death with a patient. As a doctor who specializes in carrying mostly for people infected with HIV, that used to be a common discussion, and happily, with very effective medications which we now have available, the discussion…

  • Discharge plan: to jail

    My first real job in the health care field was an internship I participated in as an undergraduate.  I worked for a summer at the Family Practice Residency Program of Natividad Medical Center in Salinas, CA.  A few years prior to my internship, one of the residents had noticed that there were an unusual number of…

  • Root canal – Part 2

    I was both dreading and looking forward to today’s visit to my lovely dentist, Dr. G. The adventure started about two weeks ago, with a weekend of pain, followed by relief/torture in his office, as he began the root canal procedure, and relieved the pressure of an infected root.  If you missed it, I described…

  • Listening…

    I am a regular NPR listener, mostly Morning Edition and All Things Considered, but today I happened to be listening midday, and I caught the program Tell Me More, and, specifically, an interview with Neil Conan, who is apparently retiring from hosting the program Talk of the Nation (TOTN) which I have listened to, on…

  • The mortality thing

    OK, so I promised, a couple of days ago, to fill in on the discussions around Death (yes, with a capital D) that have been a constant theme of the past month.  We have heard, time and time again, about how J had a mommy and a daddy who died, and how he didn’t come…