Non-fiction

Friends tell me that my personality has returned. I laugh more. I smile like me, unmasked. It hasn’t been an instant or dramatic change; she didn’t raise me from the dead. But as time stretches since the surgeries and we continue to balance my medications with the contraption’s settings, a little more of my light has seeped back in. I am grateful to Her for that.

Pure bliss. I was 26 years old, enjoying the summer off from graduate school and life as a newlywed. I married my soulmate that May in an intimate gathering of friends and family. My three-year-old daughter was delighted with my choice in a life partner; she named him “Big Daddy” due to his height compared to her biological father. 

Rachel likes to spend night times in our emergency room — not as a patient though.  She’s an artist with a successful downtown studio.

My friend Meredith always had a knack for finding places where rent was optional.

It was just after midnight on the Ides of March when I first held my daughter—merely an hour old—and watched the nurses try to save her mother’s life.

In the way of five-year-olds, my kindergartener is convinced he knows sign language. He moves his hands and arms around in elaborate gestures that sometimes involve his hips, and then quizzes me on what he just said. 

Somewhere between the second and third year of medical school, you start to grow tired of the phrase “You can’t just know the information — you have to apply it.” They keep telling us that, but they don’t exactly tell you how to do that. Medical school is a game of memorization in large part. How many tidbits of information can you squeeze in your brain? Not only that, but can you dig it back out after months of putting it in? 

My son was eight years old when he was struck and thrown by a car while riding his bike. Of course, this was a traumatic event, but he seemed to bounce back quickly. My little boy soon looked and acted his same self.  He was running, laughing, studying just as he had been before he was hurt.

My husband, R, and I sat on the couch in the living room of our London rental listening on speakerphone to Dr. P, a senior pulmonary specialist at an east London hospital as she took care of R’s father, ill with COVID-19 pneumonia.

I recall the day strawberry-banana smoothies turned their backs on me.

I live two blocks from a hospital, so that the moans of passing ambulances never diminish but are choked off mid-cry. At the start of the pandemic, the ambulances wailed by my apartment building so consistently that it became a soundtrack, the woodwind section of a diabolical orchestra in a perpetual, unresolved tune-up. 

The AIDS quilt panels spread out over a quarter mile in Washington, D.C., on the National Mall. People slowly, reverently, walk looking down, taking in endless panels. The reality of it all jolted me.

Decades ago, I stood before her, scalpel in hand, a shy young medical student, awestruck and trembling. Now I am 65, the age of my cadaver.

She is thin, frail, and sickly when I meet her.  The right side of her chest is tattooed with a dark purple bruise that spreads up her neck – the aftermath of her port removal.  She is tethered to an IV pole by multiple infusions of antibiotics, vasopressors, and fluids.  She is bald.  Her husband is next to her bed, his skin rough and tanned, shadowed by white hair and a stiff beard.  He is feeding her watermelon with a spoon as she smiles when I walk in, her smile lighting up the room. 

“Help! Help! Help!” The repeated cries carried down the hospital corridor as I quickened my pace. 

I turned a corner and the yelling stopped. There was my mother lying in a bed, flanked by two nurses failing in their effort to remove her IV line.

Her voice was loud and insistent: “Michael, get up! GET UP! Open your eyes and GET UP! GET UP NOW, Michael. I COMMAND YOU, in the name of God, GET UP!”

I don’t have all the answers. In fact, I don’t have any answers. That’s not what this is going to be, although I wish it was.

It’s easy to forget what those first months were like. I drove to work on the Southeast Expressway; a highway once clogged with rush hour traffic was near empty. COVID followed everyone everywhere – TV, radio, print media, the Internet, signs on doors to any stores still open.

Before I began medical school one of my mentors told me, “You do not have to be the smartest to make it. You just have to persevere.” 

Most people know the word “adrenaline” better than the word “epinephrine,” but the substance is one and the same.

“Hello?” I said.
“Hey, guess what!” my wife shouted through the telephone.

I am living the dream that my five-year-old self couldn’t even fully imagine, yet some days, actually a lot of days, the dream and idea of being a doctor one day is the only thing that keeps me going. This is lonely. This is hard.

She began to wheel me through the door and offer encouraging words of farewell when she suddenly stopped. “Wait a minute,” she said. “That’s not him.” She promptly spun me around and headed back into the building.

A positive diagnosis of HIV and I’m stripped of my identity. I’m no longer a person but a case, a number to be polled or studied, tracked by a system that doesn’t always have my back – a  system that speaks of double standards and hypocrisy. If called to question we will look over your rights […]

The phone trembled against my ear. “Can’t breathe…can’t breathe…water…need water.”

As the elevator doors opened, we barely noticed the huge letters that read CANCER SERVICES. A long day had already followed a long sleepless night. 

Sometimes things happen at just the right time. Serendipity? A blessing? It doesn’t matter what we call it.

My father just threatened another resident – “I’ll kill you!” – during dinner at his retirement community, the assistant director tells me on the phone. He must get checked tonight at the emergency room for a urinary tract infection, which can cause erratic behavior, she says.

Well, it has been since January 2020 that we have been talking about COVID-19. It was December 2019 when first cases of infection were described in China, or maybe when the first case appeared in these United States on the West Coast. The disease or the pandemic as it is called now has affected several […]

A month after I retired from the University of Florida in 2007, two letters came in the mail from England: my birth certificate (February 23, 1942), replacing the one I’d lost somewhere on my travels, and my final pension award from Newcastle-on-Tyne. Newcastle is not only home to the British Pension Office but also the city of my father’s recent death. This full life cycle, tucked into two envelopes resting one on the other in my mailbox, sent me off on a journey of reminiscence.

Everybody has one. Everybody has their person. The one who was “the reason for going into it.” Who knows how many different names show up in each medical school application? Clarke Wesley Johnson. Not born to but adopted by Hans and Judy Johnson; the first boy of the family. He had darker skin than the rest of the household and a large scar from the top of his chest to his belly button.

It was during this time – elementary school and high school – that I vacillated in my dreams of a chosen profession. I wanted to be either a doctor or a writer.

As I am able, I strive to be informed about weighty matters that influence my daily interactions with patients.

No one knows how long the tattered box lay by the side of the road. Maybe a week passed before a curious traveler stopped to peel back the tape and take a peek inside.

On a beautiful Friday morning in the spring of 2020, Mr. B awaited his first dose of pembrolizumab in the chemotherapy infusion room. By this time he wrestled with cancer for about three years and underwent several lines of treatment, yet he was so resilient that that he continued weight training at home. He said, “It was still worth a try, if this could buy me some more time with my family.”

Before I moved to the United States from India almost two decades ago, my usual way to greet people was namaste — a Sanskrit word referring to a gesture widely used throughout the Indian subcontinent as a respectful form of greeting, acknowledging, and welcoming a relative, a guest, or stranger.

Do you remember your first patient in your chosen specialty, or what was to be your chosen specialty?

World War III: a fight we never hoped to see, nor imagined would have come in form of a microscopic particle.

Look at the flowers. View the beauty in the chaos. All the different flowers, grasses, and entanglements of green.

Lights, bright lights, blurry lights, headlights, flashing ambulance lights, EMT flashlights, fluorescent hospital lights. That’s probably some of the only things I actually can recall about that night.

I’m not a medical doctor. I don’t even play one on TV. My background is in education and journalism, and I came to work in a Family Medicine residency program long after I diagnosed myself as having a serious case of classic film passion.

Her eyes, still fixed on her Converse, began to well up with tears. One escaped and traced an uneven river down her face. She did not move to brush it away.

…neuroscientists feel overwhelmed by the proliferation of their own literature, but also the sheer number of “breakthroughs” published adds to the inordinate weight of the competition. We should remember that most theories are actually proven wrong, and that is “business as usual” in science.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, perhaps the most honored and well-known Latin American novelist of the modern age was born in Aracataca, Colombia, in 1927. These origins identify him in Colombia as a “Costeño,” a native of the Caribbean coastal region of the country known for its color, vibrancy, and the rhythm of its music and language, contrary to the dreary, wet, mountainous interior where the capital city of Bogota is located.