The American Doctor

He had used a wire to hang himself, and I could see its fine indentation mark around his neck. He was the first dead patient I had seen, and it occurred on the last day of my emergency medicine rotation in medical school.  It was so disturbing that I walked out of the hospital without telling anyone, and I kept on going until I reached my apartment three miles away.

The next day was the start of my obstetrics and gynecology rotation, and by late morning I was already scrubbed and gowned and standing in the operating room, watching a C-section.  About halfway through, the attending physician waved me over to the operating table, guided my gloved hand into the patient’s open belly, and asked if I could feel the smooth, hard surface gliding under my cupped hand.  It was the baby’s head.

In less than twenty-four hours, I had witnessed the end and beginning of life.  It was my first exposure to the profundity of medicine.  Ever since, I have wanted to tell stories of being an American Doctor.

I am now a hospitalist at a county hospital, a place for the poor and uninsured.  My interaction with patients begins when they are admitted to the hospital.  Patients come with their own life stories, which intersect with mine in memorable ways. Often these encounters lead me to reflect on important broader issues regarding patient care, during a time of transition in the American health care system.

Although the stories are real in this blog, various elements have been altered in a way that individual patients cannot be identified.  Despite these changes, the important messages conveyed by these stories are preserved.  Patients are doctors’ greatest teachers, and I am profoundly grateful to every one of them for enriching my life.

Those who don’t know how to weep with their whole heart don’t know how to laugh either. -Golda Meir