Slouching Towards Bethlehem (or, Finding Wisdom in the Moment)
May 30, 2011 | 
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You could spend a lifetime straddling stools in bars from the bay side of Isle au Haut to the far side of Tillamook, and every once in a bottle of Blue Moon you might find yourself squinting through rivers of neon and smoke, tucking your beer a bit tighter to hand and leaning into the voice beside you, all at once aware that what you’re hearing might well pass for wisdom, even, and this, a true test of wisdom, the morning after.
More often, of course, all that beer....... Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Humanistic medicine, Reflective practice, Self care | 
Tags: Humanistic medicine, Reflective practice, Self-care | 
3 Comments »
Jim Cooper’s Legacy: A Veteran’s Story (a film tribute for Memorial Day)
This short film (13 minutes) tells the real life story of Jim Ray Cooper and his experiences during the last six years of his life with advanced lung disease. Mr. Cooper was a Navy Frogman in the Korean War. The frogmen were predecessors for the modern day Navy Seals. Frogman training requires much higher levels of fitness, and during the course there is often a high elimination rate of trainees who do not make the grade. Mr. Cooper held a record for holding his breadth for five minutes! It was indeed ironic that he developed severe lung disease and was chronically breathless and oxygen dependant.
In 2005, Mr. Cooper was told that he was dying... Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Communication, Education, Geriatrics, Humanistic medicine, Pain, Patient Centered Care, Psycho-social, Team | 4 Comments »
Over the Rainbow
I am, I know, as I slip up on sixty, entering the age of imminent death.
Indeed, on any given day when I see palliative care patients, some, sometimes most, bracket my own age. Ordinary people living ordinary lives, no different than me living mine, than many I know or love, until life tosses a stick into the spokes and sends them over the handlebar....... Read the rest of this entry »
“Don’t put me out with the trash…”
His smile meets mine from the corridor, as I gown and glove to see him.
“I’m not contagious,” he tells me, weakly, his face still a smile, one nevertheless showing concern, even if his only contagion is he himself, his life, what he learned along the way, what he, my new friend, may now teach me.
“You’re not contagious,” I say immediately from the doorway, knowing that he is thinking only of the cancer, that wolf, the one as real at his throat as the central line taped to his jugular, and me, myself, thinking mere MRSA, mere VRE, bugs as ubiquitous in hospitals these days as charts or IVs, so common as to be irrelevant, certainly now, now in the face, the very face, of this man, this one man, and this cancer leaching his one life. Read the rest of this entry »
Take a peek behind the curtain: Exciting New Study on Family-Witnessed Resuscitation
"For several years, the focus of my research was out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. Throughout this time, it was the reactions of family members who had suddenly lost loved ones that impacted me the most, and as a clinical researcher in emergency medicine, these experiences led me to want to investigate ways that emergency departments could best be configured to respond to their needs. Thus, we began to study the issue of 'family-witnessed resuscitations'.” Read the rest of this entry »
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