America's AIDS Apartheid. The hope in Tracy's voice was contagious. He had just come out of Alabama's state prison system and was looking forward to starting over. He'd gotten some part-time work and secured a comfortable, if sparsely furnished apartment. He was a classic Southern hunk -- a handsome, stout, mocha-skinned man with a slow drawl and a natural charm -- and so had no trouble finding women to date. That was exciting but also scary, because Tracy had newly committed himself to confronting his 12-year-old HIV infection. He beamed with pride at the progress he was making. I wanted to be hopeful for Tracy, too. Tracy was diagnosed back in 1993, the first time he went into lockup.
America declared a terribly premature victory over AIDS more than a decade ago, when new treatment regimens hit the market and dramatically halted the parade of young funerals. More Americans are living with HIV today than ever before -- an estimated 1.2 million -- and the number is increasing by tens of thousands annually. Lessons from an Emergency Room Nightmare | Personal Health. I held my wife Veronica's hand as the technician applied cool gel to her chest. At first, the ultrasound images were the fuzzy black-and-whites I remembered from before our daughters Rebecca and Hannah were born. After a few touches to the LCD screen, a breathtaking three-dimensional movie began to run. It featured Veronica's heart, its thick walls beating yellow against a black background. The technician maneuvered a trackball to reveal the various parts undulating in unison.
Veronica is 46, does four hard workouts every week on the stepping machine, eats sensibly, and has a resting pulse of 60. You need a hard head and a soft heart to manage a loved one's medical emergency. Several people made mistakes in Veronica's care. I was swayed to discount what was happening -- Veronica, a clinical nurse specialist, was, too -- by disbelief, by her recent illness, and by her general fitness. It seems counterintuitive that demand for ER services would be sensitive to price. Disorientation. An immigrant doctor, newly arrived from India, finds that it’s the little things that can surprise you. There is snow outside the kitchen door. It covers the deck in white sheets, unbroken except for the occasional paw print, and it cascades off the steps in thick, soft layers onto the pine trees in our backyard.
Inside, our home hums with the usual Sunday evening flurry of activity. My wife is coordinating dinner with homework—both hers and the children’s. In the background, I hear my two-year-old son trying to entice the dog to sit by offering her a treat. This is no small task, given that the dog weighs nearly three times as much as he does. But he has learnt early to stand ground before his three older siblings—my stepsons—who both tower over him and dote on him, and he is practicing this skill on the dog with some flair.
All of this—a life of academia, of family, of life in snowy upstate New York—is in one sense routine, ordinary even. Duality. PREFACE: In the late twentieth century, as more and more women entered the medical profession and became mothers, people wondered what it would mean. As might have been expected, there are many realities. For Julie Rosenbaum, who teaches in a primary care internal residency program, a major concern is how she and her husband juggle their jobs with raising young children. In a split-voice narrative, Rosenbaum details the dual focus of her days and how they interact. As she and her husband ponder what’s best, she reports that academic medicine is simultaneously pondering how best to work with and support doctor-parents.
When a doctor is also a mother, sometimes the hardest part of the day is just getting out the door. Morning: as usual, I didn’t get enough sleep last night. I entered medicine at a time when opportunities for women in the profession were soaring. My three-year-old daughter, the baby, and I make it downstairs to the kitchen. The baby starts to cry. Footnotes.
Going Under. Caregiving--The Art of Becoming More Human. Magazine / Spring 2008. What the eye doctor didn’t see by grace taulsan, J94, lecturer in english Illustration By Luba Lukova The world I grew up in was riddled with dangers: snowballs, lollipops, drinking straws, metal clothes hangers, baseballs, tree branches, long-stem roses, popsicles, high-heel shoes, and the hardcover editions of books. Life was full of opportunities for blindness. My father saved up stories from his ophthalmology practice and transformed them into directives: Never rub your eyes. Always wear protective goggles. The threat here was “foreign bodies,” which, despite his explanations, I pictured as miniature men in ethnic costumes kicking as he plucked them from the whites of his patients’ eyes. And there were other rules: Don’t allow the dog to lick your face.
Jon was almost two when he hit his eye on the corner of the wooden headboard and fell to the floor. My mother helped hold my brother down. My mother sits in a plastic chair, counting the hours in rosaries. But I know the truth. Kevin Baker. Kevin Baker and his mother, Claire, at the hospital in Massachusetts where she lives. (Photo: Michal Chelbin) Sometime about thirteen years ago, my mother’s brain began to shrink. The signs that something was wrong proliferated slowly, but as ominously as something out of a science-fiction movie. My mother became unaccountably restless and unable to concentrate. She complained constantly that Larry, my stepfather, didn’t take her out anywhere, that they never did anything—although she could no longer follow the conversation at a dinner party and said things that other people found incomprehensible. She tried going back to work in some of the little tourist shops where she lived, in Rockport, Massachusetts.
She was becoming indignant a lot. It was as if every part of her personality was being slowly stripped away, layer by layer. There were other things going on as well, physical changes. My youngest sister, Pam, and I persuaded her to see a doctor. Mostly she fought with Larry. Top Doctors: My Daughter’s $29,000 Appendectomy - Philadelphia Magazine - phillymag.com. IT BEGAN THE way these things often begin. “Sarah threw up in the car!” My daughter Hannah announced brightly one evening as she and her sister got home from the performing-arts class they were taking. Hannah is in third grade and three years older than her kindergarten-age sister, but the mythic status of the Kid Who Pukes In An Inappropriate Place transcends time, space and age gap.
I know this not only because of my daughters, but because it has been 35 years since I was in third grade, and I can still conjure up both the names of the kids who heaved in our grade-school hallway and what it smelled like. (Hope you’re feeling better, Linda U.) My wife Kate and I figured that our usually spirited five-year-old was suffering from a run-of-the-mill stomach bug, so over the course of the next day and a half, Kate did what she does so well: gave Sarah lots of TLC, read to her, played with her, watched Barbie DVDs with her.
Then, naturally, I made her walk home. The Moral of the Story. I came home the other night clutching a scrap of paper towel with a mother's cell-phone number scribbled on it. I had been precepting in the residents' pediatric primary care clinic, and an intern had presented a patient: a 20-month-old boy who had been brought in by his mother because he was vomiting. He'd thrown up seven times since 2 that morning. No diarrhea, but he wasn't eating or drinking much. Still, he didn't look dehydrated, his mother said he'd had several wet diapers, and when the intern examined him, she found his diaper wet again. The intern said he had a temperature of 100.8°F, and his ears looked infected. “Oh, great,” I said, “so we know what's going on.” She nodded but looked puzzled. When I answered honestly — some kids have touchy stomachs, and when they get sick with anything, they throw up — she looked disappointed; she was expecting pathophysiology.
We went in to see the child. But she looked anxious. So we had a problem. We examined his head for bumps or bruises.