Comfort Measures Only

Campo, Rafael

Last Updated: Nov-26-2018

Davis, Cortney

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

Physician Rafael Campo's collection of new and selected poems is a lovely look back (selected poems are from 1994 to 2016) and an exciting look at thirty-one new poems that continue his trademark use of a variety of poetic forms (the title poem "Comfort Measures Only" is a Villanelle, pg 135) and the moving and personal examination of his interactions with patients. This collection begins with Campo's excellent introductory essay, "Illness as Muse" (pgs 1-9).

As the essay opens, an audience member tells Campo that his poems are "really depressing." Even Campo's spouse advises him to lighten things up, a counsel I hope the poet never heeds--for it is precisely Campo's unwavering examination of sorrow, regret, death, and despair that set his poems apart from poems that find "butterflies or snowflakes or flowers as more suitable." Campo responds: "Try as I might to take all of this concern to heart . . . I keep finding myself drawn to write about illness" (pg 1).

Campo recalls how singing and praying consoled his grandmother and seemed to lessen her physical ills: "No wonder I have come to believe in the power of the imagination if not to cure, then to heal" (pg 4). On page five he notes "To write about illness, to heed this terrible muse, is to reject distancing and to embrace empathy, for which there is no reward or claim on greatness other than perhaps the perverse joy of recognizing oneself as being susceptible to the same foibles and neuroses as anyone." Indeed it is this vulnerability--the ability to see physician and patient on the same plane, as equal players in a moment in time--that has become another hallmark of Campo's poetry. Selected poems from previously published collections follow the essay: nine poems from "The Other Man Was Me" (1994); eight poems from "What the Body Told" (1997); nine poems from "Diva" (200); five poems from "Landscape with Human Figure" (2002); seven poems from "The Enemy" (2007); and twenty poems from "Alternative Medicine" (2013). Of these collections, all but "Landscape with Human Figure" and "The Enemy" have been reviewed in the database.

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Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

Macy, Beth

Last Updated: Nov-12-2018

Teagarden, J. Russell

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Longform journalism

Summary:

Beth Macy has been a newspaper reporter in the Roanoke, Virginia area for three decades. In this book, she provides extensive reporting on the opioid crisis, how it developed and wreaked havoc in Appalachia, and how it grew into a national crisis across the United States.

“Dopesick” is the colloquial term people who are addicted and addiction medicine specialists use to describe the constellation of wrenching and violent symptoms opioid withdrawal causes. As one of Macy’s subjects describes it:

You’re throwing up.You have diarrhea. You ache so bad and you’re so irritable that you can’t stand to be touched. Your legs shake so bad you can’t sleep. You’re as ill as one hornet could ever be. And believe me, you’ll do anything to make the pain go away.” (p. 41)

As a result, not long after a person is addicted to opioids, drug seeking behaviors are not motivated by the urge for the next and best high, but instead are driven “to avoid dopesickness at any cost” (p. 9).

Macy divides her reporting into three major parts: 1) the ways Purdue Pharma fueled the explosion of opioid addiction beginning with the introduction of its product Oxycontin in 1996; 2) the ways in which people get addicted to opioids and how they get their supplies; and 3) the ways the U.S. health care system, criminal justice system, Congress, state legislatures, and regulatory agencies have failed in preventing and fixing the addiction crisis.

As a journalist, Macy weaves the stories of individuals into the larger story of the opioid addiction crisis: people who became addicted to opioids and the effect it had on their families, and the stories of health care professionals who pulled alarms about the rapidly rising rate of opioid addiction and tried as best they could to treat addicted patients and protect the public. We read about the Purdue Pharma executives who were blamed and prosecuted for the marketing campaigns that turned localized opioid addiction patterns into a national opioid addiction epidemic. And we read about individual sheriffs, investigators, prosecutors, judges, and community activists who were trying to stem the tide of addition and death. These stories intersect throughout the book.

Embedded among the individual story lines are digressions Macy uses to elaborate on certain aspects of the opioid addiction crisis. She provides historical perspectives on drug addiction, and how this crisis differs from those of the past. She puts an emphasis on how trends in medical practice to liberalize the use of opioids in the management of all types of pain—minor and major, acute and chronic—converged with Purdue Pharma marketing campaigns for its proprietary opioid products. She cites statistics to show how fast the epidemic was worsening, how widely it was spreading across the United States, and how deadly it had become with mortality rates exceeding those of AIDs mortality at its peak. Other digressions cover how illicit opioid supply chains are created and maintained, and how different levels of governments reacted to the crisis.

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Modern Death: How Medicine Changed the End of Life

Warraich, Haider

Last Updated: Oct-23-2018

Carter, III, Albert Howard

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Treatise

Summary:

This intelligent and compelling book invites us to evaluate the losses pertaining to “modern death” and to consider better ways—whether from the past or in the future—to care for the dying, their families, and all care-givers.

Some chapters, such as “How Life (and Death) Were Prolonged,” are historical, describing changes in inoculations, living conditions, and medical care that extended the human life span but also changes in dying, now often prolonged by technology. Another chapter, “How We Learned Not to Resuscitate,” relates how CPR, initially lauded and popularized, is now widely understood as futile care, especially in older people. Warraich discusses various attempts to define death (brain-based, heart-based, American Bar Association, Harvard Criteria, Uniform Determination of Death Act, even NASA) and some of the issues that still remain.

Other chapters are more physiological: “How Cells Die” explains natural processes of cell death (necrosis, autophagy, and apoptosis). Most non-medical readers haven’t heard of these and perhaps some medical personnel as well. Unaware of them as regular and usual processes, we resolutely expect people to live some four-score and ten, perhaps even more. The next-to-last chapter, “When the Plug is Pulled” discusses “terminal sedation” (a legal dosage that eases pain but is not strictly speaking euthanasia or murder) and statutes that allow for assisted death and removal of life-sustaining machines. The Nancy Cruzan case and others illustrate many difficulties. (Cruzan was in a persistent vegetative state and supported by a feeding tube. A 1990 U.S. Supreme Court 5-4 decision allowed the removal of the tube.) Warraich argues further for “patients’ right to demand and acquire the means to end their suffering with the aid of a physician” (p. 263).

Lack of resolution of these difficulties leads to problems for families of the dying and all medical personnel attending them, especially in ICU situations. Living wills are often of no help and “the end of life has become a battleground” (p. 211). He argues that surrogate roles for decisions at the end of a life often do not represent what the patient actually wanted because the surrogate's values may be different from the patient's and family members may not reach agreement on decisions. He concludes, “All in all, overinvolved family and underinvolved doctors unsurprisingly make for a particularly caustic combo” (p.214).

In “When Death Transcends” we read that spiritual and religious matters are often ignored in medical settings. Such resources, however, “may be the only means that patients have of finding comfort” (p. 148). Warraich surveys various religions, including his own, Islam. This is one of the longest chapters in the book and carefully considers the wide range of faiths people have and the regrettable lack of training for doctors in this area.

Warraich concludes, “Death needs to be closer to home, preceded by lesser disability and less isolation” (p. 278). For deaths to be “truly modern,” we need to push past taboos and misunderstandings about death.

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Histories

Guglani, Sam

Last Updated: Sep-18-2018

Miksanek, Tony

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Collection (Short Stories)

Summary:

One British hospital. Seven days and nights. Plenty of perspectives from those who work there, train there, and are treated there. Over the course of one week (October 24 thru October 30), the characters in these connected stories spill their secrets and shame, tout their triumphs and tragedies. And the danger of professional and emotional exhaustion looms very large: "Maybe this is how doctors and nurses finally burn out. Past their failures, their hours, all their inhaled sadness" (p40). What ultimately triggers burnout is "the accrued weight of so many tiny things" (p41).

Readers are privy to the thoughts and sometimes nuanced actions of medical personnel - attending physicians, residents, a medical student, and nurses. The musings of a hospital chaplain, cleaning woman, medical secretary, hospital porter, and patients (a hairdresser and a farmer) are also divulged. But the protagonist is the hospital. More than a physical structure, it is a kind of human hive with many strata of workers, occupants, and those (MD's) at the top. The hospital is portrayed as "a place of brokenness," propped up with occasional promises of hope and the might of technology. But decay can be insidious as some physicians no longer appear capable of compassion or empathy.

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This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor

Kay, Adam

Last Updated: Aug-28-2018

Miksanek, Tony

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

After a combined twelve years of medical training and working on hospital wards, this British physician leaves the medical profession. Using his diary written during a stint in the National Health Service (NHS) from 2004-2010, he recalls his experiences as a young doctor.

He describes the making of a doctor and a physician's life as "a difficult job in terms of hours, energy, and emotion" (p196) and recounts the overwhelming exhaustion and toll on his personal life. He chooses OB/GYN as his specialty partly because "I liked that in obstetrics you end up with twice the number of patients you started with, which is an unusually good batting average compared to other specialties" (p32). As for his bedside manner, "I went for a 'straight to the point' vibe - no nonsense, no small talk, let's deal with the matter in hand, a bit of sarcasm thrown into the mix" (p163).

Days are filled with doing prenatal visits, vaginal deliveries, caesarean sections, gynecologic surgeries, and lots of women's health issues. Night shifts are often hellacious as they "made Dante look like Disney" (p5). He must handle emergencies, break bad news, deal with intra-uterine deaths, and once gets sued for medical negligence. The anecdotes are sometimes tender and heart-tugging, other times wacky and gross. Consider this diary entry dated 12 March 2007: "a lump of placenta flew into my mouth during a manual removal and I had to go to occupational health about it" (p92).

The final diary entry chronicles a catastrophe. An undiagnosed placenta previa results in the delivery of a dead baby. The mother is hemorrhaging, requires an emergency hysterectomy, and is headed to the ICU. The author sits alone crying for one hour. For the next six months, he never laughs. He quits medicine and lands a job as a comedy writer and editor for television. Seriously.

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The Compassionate Connection: The Healing Power of Empathy and Mindful Listening

Rakel, David

Last Updated: Jun-18-2018

McEntyre, Marilyn

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Essay

This Narrow Space: A Pediatric Oncologist, His Jewish, Muslim, and Christian Patients, and a Hospital in Jerusalem

Waldman, Elisha

Last Updated: May-29-2018

Field, Steven

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

How Can I Help? A Week in My Life as a Psychiatrist

Bryden, Pier; Goldbloom, David

Last Updated: Feb-20-2018

Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Autobiography

Summary:

The narrator tracks a hypothetical week in the life and work of a psychiatrist in a major Canadian hospital through the stories of individual patients, some of whom were willing to be identified by name.

The book opens with “they are us” and the shocking discovery that a patient whose life has been ruined by mental illness is a medical school classmate.

Other patients have been followed for many years—a woman with eating disorder, a man with bipolar disease, another with schizophrenia. A new patient with intractable depression finally agrees to electroshock therapy, and the first treatment is described. The painful duty of making an involuntary admission pales in contrast to the devastation of losing a patient to suicide.

Goldbloom’s personal life, opinions, and worries are woven throughout with frank honesty. His mother’s metastatic brain tumor sparks the associated intimations of his own advancing age and mortality. His genuine fascination with and appreciation of the effective modalities now available are matched by his frustration over how they are beyond reach of far too many because of the stigma that is still attached to mental illness and the lack of resources and political will to make them available.

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In Flanders Fields

McCrae, John

Last Updated: Feb-06-2018

Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Human Voices Wake Us

Winakur, Jerald

Last Updated: Feb-06-2018

Kohn, Martin

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

The 55 poems in Human Voices Wake Us fall primarily into 3 categories: biographical poems, poems about the natural world, and poems about the worldly travels and travails of a man learning and practicing medicine. As I began to read this book, I started checking off all the poems that I thought might merit comment, but stopped early on since almost all called to me--each in their own voice. Thankfully—and skillfully--the poems were often placed in ways that, although drawing from the different aspects of the author’s life, they complemented each other. For example, “The Tyranny of Aging,” a poem about caring for a half paralyzed 95 year old whose last living child has died, is followed by “Redbud,” where the speaker of the poem walks “the ravines, the treed/windbreaks, the creek bottom/all the wooded places//searching for redbuds” (p.49). Another example is the poem “Shock and Awe in Comfort, Texas,” where a solitary walker confronts dive-bombing dragonflies and birds of prey doing what they need to do to stay alive followed by “What I Remember in Embryology,” a poem about being created and born: “Tethered/we are all waiting/fetuses suckling/our way//to heart and hair/teeth and bone/reaching grasping/limb buds into fingers” (p.25). Winakur came to poetry after realizing that "coming and going in the rooms on daily rounds was not enough to sustain a life"(xiv). What the reader experiences in this book is Winakur’s inspired attempt of seeking—and then delivering through poetry-- more.

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