Family Dynamics
signout | July 2, 2007I have a secret crush on one of my patients, an 85-year old man who's recovering from a bad pneumonia. After a weeklong stay in the intensive care unit, he has recovered at a remarkable pace: the day after he was extubated, he was out of bed with a physical therapist, making his way slowly around the ward with a walker and a big smile.
What motivates him to work so hard at recovery, the nurses say, is his love for his wife. They have been married 60 years. She comes in to see him every day, wheeled around by their daughter. The whole time she is there, they say, he holds her hand as if it is…
signout | March 24, 2007The first phone call came about a month ago, on a day I wasn't in clinic. The phone nurse had left me a message: Rosie's mother wants to know why she keeps turning in circles."
I had never met the 10-year-old Rosie, but looking through her old records, I found that she has a non-specific kind of global developmental delay--something we used to call MRCP, for "mentally retarded/cerebral palsy." I also found that this wasn't the first time her mother had called with concerns about Rosie's circles--over the last five years, there had been at least as many calls with the same question, and Rosie…
signout | August 13, 2006Since I came on the medicine service, my team has been taking care of a man who because of one of his unfortunate afflictions I will call Mr. Scrotum. Mr. Scrotum is a 70-something man who came to the hospital with an infected prosthetic knee joint. He had surgery to clean it out, then came to our service to get medically stabilized prior to beginning physical rehabilitation. Unfortunately, Mr. Scrotum had some post-operative complications, including some wacky mental status changes and a fairly reversible kind of kidney failure.
Mr. Scrotum's medical course, while not ideal, is a fairly…