Ars Longa Vita Brevis

Not a bad run

When my aunt’s lung cancer came back, she wasn’t young. Even in her eighties, though, she was a force. She was tall, smart as hell, and willing to travel from Florida to northern Michigan to spend her last summer with family.

Progress Notes

A woman sat in my exam room once, many years ago, and she really couldn’t tell me why. She had diabetes, high blood pressure, and all sorts of complications that no thirty-something should have. After working with me for a few months she disappeared. She skipped appointments, or showed up too late for…

Blood

She arrived by ambulance in the middle of the night, awake, alert, and bleeding like crazy. We’d gotten a call earlier in the evening that she was on her way from a small hospital about forty miles to the north. We were the big city hospital, and an attending physician had agreed to have her transferred for a…

Not a restful place

When someone asks me to put them in the hospital to “get some rest” I know they must be desperate. Hospitals aren’t the filthy warehouses of the nearly-dead they once were, but they aren’t quiet. No matter what’s wrong, you’re likely to have tubes going somewhere. People will come and go…

The wall

My dad always said the worst way to die would be emphysema. The constant struggle for breath is, to him, the worst kind of suffering. He told…

Postscript

“I’m so sorry to hear about your father.”