It’s difficult to put into words the honor I feel as an emergency physician. Strangers invite you into their lives, trusting in your training, knowledge, and compassion as they battle crisis. We are involved in intimate details of triumphs and loss o…
I pass by one of our local parochial schools on the way to clinic two mornings a week. With the school year in full swing, each Friday I see the children lining up outside to go to weekly Mass. With the girls in their grey tartan skirts and blue vests …
It all started with John F. Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency. After eight years with President Eisenhower’s baldness and Vice President Nixon’s receding hairline, the American public was ready for a change. Kennedy had great hair, which he flaun…
It all started with John F. Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency. After eight years with President Eisenhower’s baldness and Vice President Nixon’s receding hairline, the American public was ready for a change. Kennedy had great hair, which he flaun…
The storage capacity of the human mind is amazing. One estimate of the size of the brain’s “RAM” is as high as 2.5 petabytes (a million gigabytes). The number is based on the total number of neurons in the brain and the total number of possible connec…
The United States has been a slow brewing cauldron of gender bias for years. With increasing tensions and an unspoken, formidable energy in most workplaces and educational institutions, women have grown restless. The culmination has and is resulting in…
In my urban primary care clinic, creativity and advocacy are some of our most basic tools. Recently, one of our residents brought up a homeless patient’s social barriers to colorectal cancer screening: no companion to escort her home from a colonoscopy…
An excerpt from Mercy. I love kids. Pretty kids. Nice kids. Normal kids. Not this. This is not a kid. This is thirty pounds of human flesh kept alive by devices. Peg tube, tracheostomy, ventilator. He’s got contractures everywhere. He’s so folded he’d …
An excerpt from Dottoressa: An American Doctor in Rome. When I migrated from the banks of the East River to the Tiber shores the path was strewn with bureaucratic boulders, land-mines, and pitfalls. I offer the tale of my odyssey as an object lesson to…
As a pharmacy technician, I watched countless individuals speak with a pharmacist about how different drug therapies work, and what they should know before taking any pharmaceuticals. But I also have a hearing loss, and as a patient myself, I am struck…
