Dr. Pamela Wible runs a suicide hotline for physicians. She describes herself as having been obsessed with death and suicide since she was in utero, marinating in a brew of her mother’s own severe mental illness. And as a young child, Dr. Wible could only access father-daughter time if she accompanied her dad, a pathologist, […]
Dr. Eve Makoff
Eve Louise Makoff is an internal medicine and palliative care physician. She has published both personal and medicine related essays and poetry. She is working on her master’s degree at USC-Keck school of medicine in narrative medicine. She is invested in bringing humanity back to the practice of medicine.
Posted inHealth, Racial justice
‘Ask how the Americans did it’: How racial bias in US medicine inspired Hitler and persists today
The California state investigation into racial bias in healthcare only scratches the surface of a deeply-ingrained system.
Posted inHealth, Psychology, True Story
The night I called Code Lavender
July 1995. It was my first night of internship, the next step after medical school. I’d already admitted a half dozen patients to the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit from the emergency room under the watch of a third-year resident. The CCU was the scariest first-night internship assignment there was. Even some patients joked about avoiding heart attacks in […]
Posted inParenting & Family, True Story
For the love of my son and his dog—an autism story
My heart pounded as I drove slowly around bumps in the road to keep his body from shifting in the little bed on the floor next to me. At every stop, at every slow moment, I lowered a hand to his soft belly to make sure he was breathing. Tears hung in my eyes. I […]
Posted inReproductive rights, True Story
I didn’t want a baby
“Trust me,” I said. “They break.” I was twenty-six, walking in Soho with my friend Noelle, laughing over the fragility of condoms. But I wasn’t worried. How many times in my careless, sexually active life did I count and recount the number of days until I was truly “late”? I’d begun to think I was […]
Posted inTrue Story
The last words he heard
“The nurse put me on the phone. I told him his children loved him and all that. But before she hung up, I heard her say something else.”
Posted inDeath & Dying, Healthcare
Slowing to listen at the end of life
Marcia sat up on the side of the bed, a hand on each knee, and braced herself as she leaned forward to open the space in her chest for more air. At 52, she was dying of ovarian cancer that had spread to her liver. The critical organ had failed, causing excess fluid to gather […]
Posted inHealth
And the doctors fled: The second burning of Paradise, CA
The last time I saw him, in August 2020, he was on a friend’s porch, all bones. He peered out from behind the blond hair that hung down in strings, his thirty-something face looking much older, wrinkled and small. I could see from the video that he was barefoot with mud caked between his toes. He’d lost the […]
Posted inHealth
Narrative medicine: Why stories matter in healthcare
There was a low rumble in the room. I couldn’t hear what anyone was saying above the din, but I feel the excitement in my body even now as my memory-neurons fire. This new batch of future doctors was about to enter terrain more daunting than the fundamentals of pharmacology: They would read a poem […]
Posted inPoetry
What if
What if One day it just wasn’t working anymore. What if You needed to step out from behind the murky mask and go your own way. What if Your heart stopped beating to the familiar drum of clatter and chaos. What if You slipped into your comfortable shoes, your bed clothes, a shiny lake And […]