A few months ago, I was having lunch with a friend. He mentioned a recent outpatient surgery that he had and indicated that upon being discharged, he was given a prescription for 30 pain pills. Although the recovery was uncomfortable, the pain was not …
The nights from that time run together in my memory: The cuffs of my scrub pants getting caught on the heels of my clogs because my pants were sagging; stuffing dry graham crackers I stole from the nursing stations into my mouth at 4 a.m. to stay awake…
An excerpt from How to Be Sick: A Buddhist-Inspired Guide for the Chronically Ill and Their Caregivers (Second Edition). Copyright 2018 by Toni Bernhard. Excerpted with permission from Wisdom Publications. In the years since I’ve been chronically ill, more essential to me than formal meditation has been mindfulness outside of meditation. Mindfulness refers to paying attention […]
I don’t miss making the phone calls in the middle of the night. “Hi, this is Dr. Yang calling from the psychiatric emergency service. May I speak to Mr. or Mrs. Doe?” “Yeah, this is Mr. Doe,” he’d reply, his voice thick and slow with sleep. “I’m sorry to call so late. Your son is […]
Depression is commonly linked to career disappointments, financial setbacks, and disruption of normal routines — especially sleep pattern — as well as social pressures and conflict in personal relationships. It is this last factor that has captured my attention in relation to depression. Personal relationships, in particular, the most personal, love partnerships, have a profound […]
When I was first reading up on JM (identifying information changed), I thought the case would go smoothly, well, as smoothly as any inpatient psychiatry case can go. All I had known about her is that she was an elderly woman who was recently released from jail. When the staff came to escort JM to […]
Medicine has created a culture where public embarrassment, bullying, and passive-aggression have become pedagogy. How can we seek to care for others, when we treat our own so cruelly? I recently met Angie (name changed), a young university student who had entered the clinical years of medical school. Like many, she was introduced to medicine […]
In the era of #MeToo, Missy Elliot, Whitney Houston, Tyler Perry, Oprah, Ashley Judd, Gabrielle Union, Teri Hatcher and, now, Padma Lakshmi — keeping kids safe and helping adults heal is our job as physicians. I am a pediatrician — and I am an incest survivor. My perpetrator was also a physician. I bore a […]
My medical center recently cemented an agreement with the Veterans Administration to offer care to veterans who could not be accommodated at the VA. We need paying patients, they need doctors of our caliber — establishing mutual benefit. Military veterans have always been among our patients. During my professional lifetime that has included men of […]
I am both relieved and nervous because they say that the first year is the worst, but now I have the overarching cloud of doom following me around during second year: Step 1. Now that I’m home, I constantly am wondering how I made it this far — in disbelief that I passed all my […]
