Tag: Pulse: Stories from the Heart of Medicine

A Physician’s Story

  

I haven’t posted any stories about what physicians face when working on the front lines during the Covid-19 pandemic. Of course, my Blog is about nursing. In more recent years, the collaboration between nurses and physicians has grown. The professions work together with more mutual respect than when I began my nursing career. And physicians on the front line of the Covid-19 pandemic risk their lives just as nurses do. 

I have reblogged a story written by a physician who is working “extra on-call time” to care for the new admissions at a local hospital.  I read this essay in the online publication: Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine.

I highly recommend reading Pulse, which publishes each Friday. There you will find stories that show the human aspect behind the practice of medicine. 

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In Need of a Prayer

Posted By Jo Marie Reilly On December 16, 2020 @ 10:44 pm In Stories 

The new patient’s name is Emmanuel. He was sent from his nursing home to our emergency room with a cough and fever. The oxygen level in his blood is well below normal, and he’s gasping for air.

It’s my third week in the local community hospital ER. I’ve been putting in extra on-call time during the COVID pandemic. It’s been rough to get back into the emergency setting while continuing my day job as a family doctor and medical educator. I’ve been sharing admissions with the hospitalist, who’s joined me in the on-call room.

“I’ll take him,” I tell my colleague.

“Sure?” he asks, eyebrows arched over his face mask.

The pager blares again.

Continue reading “A Physician’s Story”

No Edit Too Mundane

This is the week we spend our annual family vacation at the beach. While I have enjoyed the ocean and sand, I took some time to complete an assignment. One of my stories had been accepted by Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine, a digital journal. It could be published as soon as this Friday if I could make changes suggested by the editorial staff. And I did.

While most of the edits added clarity and a deeper texture to my story, one area of discussion initially seemed mundane. However, on reflection, I came to realize how important it is to add the actual time period of a story. In this case the mid ’80s.

Desk Phone

An intern who had the lead editing assignment probably was born into the cell phone era and never experienced a “desk” phone that, in most cases, was immovable from its position unless you added an additional cord.

vintage telephone cord

For example, in order to move about room, you had to add a long extension cord from the outlet in the wall to the base phone, then hold the base with one hand and with the other clutch the receiver to one’s ear. This way you could walk away from the desk and check for a report in the near-by file cabinet. (I won’t go into the fact we had hard copies of all our documents).

If you chose to add a long line from the phone base to the receiver so you didn’t have to carry the phone base with you, you would have to scurry back to the base phone to hang up.

Coiled phone extension

Plus that cord was coiled and most often became so tangled that you had to dangle the receiver until it spun and untangled. You had to plan ahead to add the cords. If, as the young intern suggested, you added an extension cord while talking to someone, the call would be disconnected.

This is probably more than you ever cared to know about old-fashioned phones. However, I learned a lesson that sometimes we know something so intimately that we assume all others share our experiences.

 

Check this site: Pulse Friday or next Friday to see if my story made it.

 

 

 

 

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