Tag: End of Life
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The good shepherd
Pallavi TatapudySouth Kortright, New York, USA “You have arrived.” The Google Maps navigator tells me I have reached my destination. I look around, doubting if indeed this is the right location. This looks like a vibrant suburban neighborhood with life all around and surely not what I imagined. There is no external sign that a…
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A house call
Martin DukeMystic, Connecticut, United States Many years ago, in the mid 1980s, when I was still in clinical practice, I made a house call accompanied by a second year medical student who was coming to my office one day a week as part of her course in physical diagnosis. The patient I had been called…
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How we love
Linda ClarkeGuelph, Ontario, Canada The communities of health care and medicine are richly storied. For almost three decades, I have invited people in those communities to tell me their stories and they have been generous in their telling. A story told can be image-laden and many of those images become part of my own story.…
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The talk
Akshay KhatriValhalla, New York, United States I walked into the emergency department with a sense of trepidation. The patient I was evaluating was Mrs. G, a woman whom I had cared for in the hospital a few months earlier. Now she was back from the nursing home with more shortness of breath. Having received a…
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When there’s no plug to pull
Darcy SternbergNew York, New York, United States At night I lie awake on the living room sofa staring at the moon, envying its constancy. Change had eaten up our lives. My husband, Marty, and I met in 1986 when he was forty-nine and I was thirty-five. Should I have been concerned by a shaky left…
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An act of cowardice
Michael ShenIndianapolis, Indiana, United States In autumn, the leaves turn yellow and die. The cirrhotics in the unit do the same. Their path already charted, their lives like leaves in the wind, we carried them as long as we could. We poked and drained and filled, knowing that nothing would change the inevitable. Like leaves,…