These days I wake up early, often by 5:30 a.m. I am eating yogurt and berries at 6 a.m. when the phone rings. “Your patient came back. She’s fully dilated. Do you want to come in?” I think for a moment. It is Rosh Hashanah after all. I want to go to synagogue, but I have been waiting for this… Read More »New year, old stories
Watching the erosion of reproductive rights now happening in the United States makes me fear that all those rights we fought so hard for when I was young could just be whisked away and we could find ourselves back again where the rights of women and the freedoms of LGBTQ+ people are denied. When I was a medical student back… Read More »Things that could fall apart
In my long and winding journey as a physician there have been a few books and papers that have really informed or changed how I interact with patients. Patient Centered Medicine, by Stewart et al, is one such book. And the first chapter of Balint’s The Doctor the Patient and his Illness, when he speaks about how true healing can only happen when… Read More »Medical Student Disease changes with age, but doesn’t disappear
“You seem discouraged,” my sister said to me one day, as we were watching the world go by from a terrace restaurant on Rue St. Laurent. “You usually like your work, but recently you are complaining a lot.” I sighed. Sometimes having a sister who knows you so well can be difficult. She was right, as usual. The job has… Read More »You seem discouraged
Sharifa is someone who defies pigeonholes. Born in a country which does not encourage the education of women, she went to university and became and engineer. Told she was too fat and unattractive, she became a passionate and disciplined athlete. Told her educational and professional status would make her unfit for marriage, she found a man who wholeheartedly supported and… Read More »A box of dates
“A fifty two year old female comes in and encapsulates her presenting complaint in four short words: ‘I just feel blah.’ As Sandy Burstein noted, the family practitioner generally has less to begin with than, say, a nephrologist, who knows when referrals come in that their problems are in their kidneys. ‘Blah’ is a psycho-medical condition at the center of… Read More »Numerators and denominators
They met in Khalid’s comic book store. Erin couldn’t stop coming in to pick up Dave’s monthly shipment of Spiderman “Books” which had been an important part of his life since his early adolescence. His untimely death was not enough reason to stop collecting, and Khalid was an important friend who’d supported Erin through the final days of Dave’s illness.
I love being known. As I have written before, I get a narcissistic pleasure when people stop me on the street to show me their teenage children whom I delivered years ago, or when the librarian says “Oh I know who you are, everyone does.” This happens because while Montreal is a metropolis, English Montreal is a village, and Jewish… Read More »Please, please don’t ask me
In the legend of quest for the Holy Grail, soon after leaving King Arthur’s court, the young knight seeking the grail finds himself riding through a wasteland towards a castle. Different stories have Percival or Galahad or Gawain, surrounded by withered fields. Nothing grows, and even the birds are silenced. As he nears the castle, he sees a man fishing… Read More »The holy grail of patient care
In the literature on medical errors there is a concept called the “Swiss Cheese Effect.” This happens in real life, too. Accidents happen when all the little precautions we use to keep ourselves safe fail and we literally slip through the cracks. Almost three weeks ago I was on my way down the stairs to drive to my osteopath for… Read More »Slipping