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Who Will Heal The Healers?

Pamela Wible On What’s Missing From Healthcare Reform

I was extremely disheartened, because I felt I was destined to be a doctor, but I couldn’t sustain my enthusiasm on the assembly line; it was such a dehumanizing experience. I was tired of interrupting crying people to say, “Sorry, we’re out of time.” I wanted to be kind to patients, even if it meant a huge cut in my salary. Many doctors feel this way. I’ve met several female physicians who are ready to quit medicine and find other work.

Future Zarahs

The Peace Corps doesn’t send volunteers to the countries where we work, those anarchic Fourth World places where the globalization beast barely pauses to wipe its lips — places like Sierra Leone in 2004.

At Her Feet

The door to my mother’s apartment at the assisted-living facility is unlocked, so I enter. The Steinway, silent and black, takes up most of the living room. In the second bedroom — where she keeps her electric piano, painting supplies, and a daybed — the radio plays classical music. It’s nine in the morning, and the blinds have not yet been raised, but there’s light enough for me to see my mother lying on her side on the daybed in her ruby-colored robe.

Room 3206

Mr. K. was forty-two and almost dead, kept alive by machines, tubes, and liquids that would at best give him two or three days more. His wife had brought him to the emergency room, probably because he was confused or vomiting or had chest pain. It soon became clear that he had taken too much Vicodin or heroin or any one of a number of potentially lethal drugs, perhaps by accident, perhaps not.

Sunbeams

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.

Major General Smedley Butler

Bible Hockey

Jail seems like a metaphor for the human condition: we all have life without the possibility of parole. And, as in life, some people serve their sentences in nicer places than others. Foxtrot — or “the hole,” as the inmates call it — is the worst place to be. It is like the underworld, a frightening and remote region where everything is cement or metal.

Health Care

I’m sitting in my new primary-care physician’s office discussing the hypoglycemia, fatigue, headaches, and food allergies that have been nibbling away at me for the past fifteen years, like so many hungry mice.

baby blood

Silas started the way all babies do: a divided cell, a spot of blood. Then, after all the work, the perils of miscarriage, the sickness and swelling, he was born too early, and I found that my precious boy had a bad heart. He needed blood and money and about a million years of good luck.

Hospital Attack Wounds 3

Hearing herself, she waves her hand. “It’s not. . . . It’s trucky.” The words leaving her mouth flutter around her like small, confused birds that keep bumping into each other in midflight.