Summary:

This memoir focuses on the various ways in which his being an African American affected Tweedy’s medical education and early practice as a medical resident and later in psychiatry. Raised in the relative safety and privilege of an intact family, he found himself underprepared for some of the blatant forms of personal prejudice and institutional racism he encountered in his first years of medical education at Duke Medical School.  One shocking moment he recounts in some detail occurred when a professor, seeing him seated in the lecture hall, assumed he’d come to fix the lights.  Other distressing learning moments occur in his work at a clinic serving the rural poor, mostly black patients, where he comes to a new, heightened awareness of the socioeconomic forces that entrap them and how their lives and health are circumscribed and often shortened by those forces.  Well into his early years of practice he notices, with more and more awareness of social contexts and political forces, how the color line continues to make a difference in professional life, though in subtler ways.  The narrative recounts clearly and judiciously the moments of recognition and decision that have shaped his subsequent medical career.    

View full annotation

Summary:

Not God is a "play in verse" with two characters, a hospitalized patient and the patient's doctor. The scare quotes indicate the fluid quality of Not God, which the author originally conceived as a sequence of poems spoken in a patient's voice. Subsequently, he added the doctor poems (monologues) to create a "dialog" between the two voices. Once again, scare quotes suggest the atypical quality of this dialogue, since the two characters express different feelings and perspectives on the situation, but do not directly address one another. The play version has received several performances at colleges and small theaters.The patient speaks first in a monologue that begins "A man's cough bounces down the hallway / like pick up sticks... " and ends with "I am here two weeks." (p. 7) It soon becomes evident that he/she has cancer and is receiving chemotherapy. The doctor has changed this person's life by speaking "one word," after which "nothing / would ever be the same again." (p. 10). The patient is knowledgeable, accepting of his/her condition, a keen observer with a good sense of humor, as in "Doldrums" (p. 19) and "Cricket" (p. 23), and a person who affirms life in spite of adversity. The doctor is burdened with the power of medical knowledge. In particular, he understands the deadly meaning of signs and symptoms: "We say / excess water and swelling of the belly, knowing / full well... / an ovarian cancer is almost certain." (p. 33) But the meaning this represents is chaos: there is nothing humane or transcendent about cancer. Unlike his baseball card collection in childhood ("Shoebox," p. 35), cancer is neither confined nor orderly. In the second act, the patient sympathizes with the doctor whose "head is so cluttered / with obligatory data." Paradoxically, the doctor must be protected because he is "filled with dying." (p. 41) The doctor becomes angry with the burden, "Why / ask me a question that only God can answer?" (p. 49) and cries out that his work is "alchemy, / potions and witches' brews." (p. 54) In the end, while dying, the patient imagines "a bridge that can cross / the Atlantic." (p. 68), while the doctor speaks a prayer, "The word cure, dear God, is always / near my lips, though I have been constrained from / saying it aloud." (p. 66)

View full annotation

Summary:

In this collection (80 pages), Marc Straus speaks of the inadequacy of communication and knowledge in medicine; the pauses, the distance, the hesitations. You think you know what you are doing, "But no, they always ask the question / I never knew." ("The Log of Pi") "The question / might be so simple, so clear / that you’re unprepared to answer." ("Questions and Answers") Though words are in one way inadequate, the medical word carries great power: " . . . I knew that moment / I would say one word for her and nothing / would ever be the same again." (One Word, annotated in this database.)The poet comes to understand that he represents both sides of medicine, both the detached and distant Dr. Gold, and the warm and trustworthy Dr. Green. (See annotation of Dr. Gold & Dr. Green) Unfortunately, this knowledge only comes about after the patient has died ("Dr. Gold & Dr. Green, II"). We learn from experience, sometimes too late.

View full annotation

Summary:

The speaker reflects that "life is sometimes reduced / to a single word . . . . " He remembers one incident at a bus stop, another interviewing a man "for a job in my lab." Then there was the time a woman "walked / into my office for one thing . . . . " He discovered a "fullness" in her neck and knew that the word he would say to her, the one word, would change her life: "nothing / would ever be the same again."

View full annotation

Summary:

A “drive-by mammogram” leads the writer, Barbara, to a biopsy of a suspicious breast lump. She awakes from the fog of anesthesia to hear the surgeon’s bland remark: “Unfortunately, there is a cancer.” Welcome to Cancerland, a place where her identity is displaced by the vast implications of the diagnosis, another operation, and arduous months of chemotherapy. What works for her own peace of mind has little to do with the trappings of pink-ribbon sentimentalism in the survivors groups.

Barbara resorts to her knowledge of cell biology, asks to see her own tumor under the microscope, and contemplates the meaning of visualizing the malignant cells even if she does not believe the exercise can help her. She dissects the rank commercialism and denial in the survivor movement: let me die of “anything but the sticky sentimentalism in that Teddy Bear.” She decries the claims that cancer therapy makes better skin, better hair, and better people, with better bodies, especially when an implant on one side subtends a cosmetic procedure on the other.

Posting these thoughts on a chat line, she discovers that most women berate her attitude and suggest she needs a psychiatrist. But one dying woman agrees with her distress, and writes of having cancer, “IT IS NOT OK.” Admitting feminists can be found in the “survivor” community, Barbara faults its underlying tone for being coercively optimistic, infantilizing, and insulting to the dying and the dead. She is angry. Very angry, and her “purifying rage” spares no one: doctors, support groups, feminists, drug companies, and the Cancer Society. Nevertheless--and in keeping with her earlier work--she credits the women’s movement with helping to rid the world of three medical evils: the radical Halsted mastectomy, the practice of proceeding to mastectomy from biopsy without waking up the patient, and high dose chemotherapy.

Two disturbing ironies bring the essay to a close. The first, is the possibility that mammograms may not be saving or even prolonging lives, even as they detect cancers; they make women dwell in Cancerland for longer and cause too many “unnecessary” biopsies. The mammogram is a ritual, she says. The second irony lies in the role of the pharmaceutical industry which fosters the pink power movement –the ribbons, the teddy bears, the marathons-- while manufacturing the expensive poisons that seem to have anticancer side effects. These same companies, she argues, have also manufactured carcinogenic pesticides that pollute the environment. Having profitably poisoned women into having breast cancers, they continue to profit from poisons of chemotherapy.
She faults both the “cult” of the survivors movement and the American Cancer Society for their “unquestioning faith” in these imperfect instruments of action.

View full annotation

Summary:

Minna Bernays is the younger sister of Martha, Sigmund Freud's wife. Her own fiancé has died and by 1895, she is reduced to joining her sister’s family in Vienna because she has abandoned her position as a companion to a demanding, prejudiced aristocrat. The six Freud children love her, but she finds them exhausting and undisciplined. Obsessed with order, housework, and social standing, and possibly suffering from psychosomatic ailments, Martha is happy to leave the care of the children to Minna. She disapproves of her husband’s theories about sexual frustration as a cause of mental distress and refuses to discuss his ideas. Nevertheless, Martha is well aware that growing anti-semitism hampers her husband’s career, and she is eager for him to succeed: he could consider a conversion of convenience, like the composer Gustav Mahler.

Minna finds herself drawn to Sigmund for his intellect and his novel ideas. She is also attracted to him physically, and he to her. She resists the temptation, but he does not and actively pursues her, inducing her to try cocaine too. He justifies it - the sex and the drugs - as necessities for mental and physical well-being and he rejects the guilt that, he claims, so-called civilization would impose.

She tries to leave by finding another job as a ladies’ companion in Frankfurt, but he follows her there. They escape for an idyllic holiday to a hotel in Switzerland, then he brings her back to the family home. But his ardor cools and she is wounded, displaced by his enthusiasm for Wilhelm Fliess and Lou Andreas-Salomé.

Soon she discovers that she is pregnant, and Freud sends her away to a “spa” for an abortion, but at the last moment, she decides to keep her baby. Sadly she miscarries and returns to the Freud family with whom she remains for more than four decades until her death in 1941.

View full annotation

Summary:

Matthew McCarthy begins his memoir of medicine internship year at Columbia University with a glimpse into his first rotation, surgery, as a Harvard medical student. He had exhibited a talent for surgery and liked it – an affinity compatible with his dexterity as a minor league baseball player and sense of team spirit. The reader meets some of McCarthy’s memorable mentors, and, although he opts to not pursue surgery as a career, McCarthy’s eye for seeking productive apprenticeships with talented housestaff and faculty allow him to guide the reader through a year of drinking from the firehose, also known as internship. Medical training is full of liminal experiences, and internship is one the most powerful and transformative.  

McCarthy’s eagerness to do well, both by his patients and by his medical colleagues and team, and his candor with revealing his mental and bodily responses to the stress and strain of the responsibilities of internship, make him an adept guide. For example, he has gulped an iced coffee and is churning at the bit to take care of a new admission on his first day of call in the cardiac care unit (CCU). His resident, called Baio in the book, tries to tell McCarthy to take it easy. But McCarthy notes, “Our orientation leaders, a peppy group of second- and third year residents, had instructed us to exude a demented degree of enthusiasm at all times, which wasn’t difficult now that my blood was more caffeine than hemoglobin.” (p 15) The previous chapter had ended with a cliffhanger – a patient life would be placed in danger because neophyte McCarthy misses the importance of a key clinical finding – what and how that plays out will wait until McCarthy guides us through the terror and exhilaration he feels as he begins his CCU rotation.  

McCarthy has a good sense of the ironic: the huge banner advertising the hospital reads “Amazing Things are Happening Here!” Indeed, not only for patients and families, but also for the many trainees and workers. We watch McCarthy successfully perform his first needle decompression of a pneumothorax; he is allowed to attempt it as he notes that he watched the video of the procedure. But unlike the video, he needs to readjust the needle several times and add on some additional tubing and water trap, which makes the scenario more true-to-life than a fictionalized ‘save.’ The author ends the chapter with congratulations from resident Baio: “Well done… Amazing things are indeed happening here.” (p 244) As McCarthy’s year continues, many things do happen, including an infected needle stick, telling bad news to a new widow, and developing a friendship with a longterm hospital patient waiting for a heart transplant.

View full annotation

Summary:

Since Joy Davidman is known to most readers as the woman C.S. Lewis married late in life and lost to cancer four years after that marriage, it is likely that many readers will pick up Joy Davidman’s letters out of fondness for her husband’s Narnia stories or popular theology.  They will quickly find that the letters chronicle a life of considerable interest in itself.  Davidman was an award-winning writer herself, a secular Jew and atheist who turned hopefully to communism and then wholeheartedly to Christianity in her later years, though remaining skeptical—and acerbic—about church people.  The fact that she remained friends with her first husband after their difficult marriage broke up resulted in many of the letters in the collection, which include material Lewis fans will be glad to see, though it offers little intimate information about their lives except that they were devoted to one another through her painful final years with breast cancer.  Her account of that last illness is often matter-of-fact; she writes as though it is one of the less interesting parts of her life, which was full of intellectual pursuits, including editing some of Lewis’s later works, and of practical concerns that included caring for her two boys with whom she emigrated to England from New York.  

View full annotation

Summary:

A bicycling, bee-keeping, British neurosurgeon approaching the end of his professional career recalls some distinctive patients, surgical triumphs as well as notable failures, difficult decisions, and mistakes. Nearly thirty years of a busy neurosurgical practice are distilled into a collection of linked stories throbbing with drama - both the flamboyant kind and the softly simmering type.

Most chapters are titled after a medical condition (exceptions are "Hubris" and "Melodrama"). Some of the headings are familiar - Trauma, Infarct, Aneurysm, Meningioma. Other chapter titles flaunt delicious medical terminology that mingles the mysterious and the poetic with nomenclature such as Angor animi, Neurotmesis, Photopsia, and Anaesthesia dolorosa.

Included are riveting accounts of both mundane and seemingly miraculous patient outcomes. One success story involves a pregnant woman losing her sight due to a brain tumor that compresses the optic nerves. Her vision is restored with an operation performed by the author. Her baby is born healthy too. But tales of failure and loss - malignant glioblastomas that are invulnerable to any treatment, operative calamities including bleeding of the brain, paralysis, and stroke - are tragically common. The author describes his humanitarian work in the Ukraine. He admits his aggravation with hospital bureaucracy and is frequently frustrated by England's National Health Service.

Sometimes the shoe falls on the other foot, and the doctor learns what it is to be a patient. He suffers a retinal detachment. He falls down some stairs and fractures his leg. His mother succumbs to metastatic breast cancer. His three month old son requires surgery for a benign brain tumor.

As his career winds down, the author grows increasingly philosophical. He acknowledges his diminishing professional detachment, his fading fear of failure, and his less-hardened self. He becomes a sort of vessel for patients to empty their misery into. He is cognizant of the painful privilege it is to be a doctor.

View full annotation

Summary:

In this young adult novel, Kristin Lattimer is a high school senior who seems to have everything – good looks, two best friends Vee and Faith, excellent athleticism especially in hurdles, a scholarship to State University, and a hunk of a boyfriend. She and her boyfriend are even voted Prom Queen and King. Kristin’s dad is a single parent, as her mother died of cervical cancer when Kristin was in 6th grade. Hence Kristin’s primary sources of knowledge of adolescent changes are her Aunt Carla and her peers, and she is able, at age 18 to chalk up her lack, not only of menstruation, but also of menarche to her running practice. But when she experiences painful and incomplete intercourse, she seeks the advice of a friend’s gynecologist.

 Dr. Johnson quickly diagnoses “androgen insensitivity syndrome” and explains that AIS is “a unique genetic syndrome that causes an intersex state – where a person looks outwardly like a female, but has some of the internal characteristics of a male.” (p. 37) The gynecologist then stumbles through further explanations and concludes, “Miss Lattimer, I think that you might be what some people call a hermaphrodite.” (p. 38) To the now stunned teen, the physician further explains karyotypes, hormone levels and the “better term” intersex. Since Kristin has undescended testes, the discussion includes possible cancer risk, and Kristin’s dad is called into the doctor’s office as well.

 The reader follows Kristin’s journey of discovery – meeting a ‘specialist,’ urologist Dr. Cheng, who provides the definitive diagnosis of AIS and explains that “chromosomal sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation are all separate concepts.” (p. 59) Issues of privacy, friendship, betrayal, sexuality, community, ostracism, social media, athletic rules vis-à-vis gender, and support groups are woven into the story and Kristin learns to cope with her new diagnosis and self-awareness.

View full annotation