Author: gozzter
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The Humility of Age
There is a humility that accompanies age, shuffles along beside it, tugs on its sleeve to attract attention. Or is it insecurity? Or maybe resignation? It’s a gradual thing -for me at least- and it surfaces mainly after a busy and sleepless night on call when the stark, brutal demons of decisions made, or actions taken, stalk the leaf-bare branches…
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Harm Reduction
I have always been suspicious of zero-tolerance; it implies intolerance as much as anything else. A thousand people crossing a bridge, are a thousand people crossing a thousand bridges… We are simply not all the same, nor are our worlds, our needs, our perspectives. And even if some issue could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, there would…
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Touch
Several years ago, I noticed a lump in my neck; I was no longer young, and I was terrified. The differential diagnosis was given to me by a colleague I greatly respected, but I had not expected the presentation to be so matter of fact. I don’t know what I had anticipated, but somehow there was a gap between her words and my condition, between…
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Gender
I am a prisoner of my age, a hostage to my generation; I never thought I’d say that, but I suppose none of us do… We are as contemporary as our minds and experience will allow. My own epiphany came, as I recall, when a patient engaged me in a discussion of gender. I had not…
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The Ethics of Counselling
Primum non nocere -First, do no harm. I remember the phrase was used in one of the first lectures I attended in medical school and it nested -sometimes uncomfortably- in my conscience as the lectures and the years progressed. It would signal me from the back seat in Pharmacology lectures and tug on my sleeve in Physiology labs when…
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Dermoid
She was sitting in a black leather chair in the corner by the window holding a magazine in one hand. A small, thin woman in jeans and a black sweat shirt with short blond hair, she watched the room like a television screen. Even in the confusion of a pregnancy-filled waiting room, she looked oddly at ease, content, smiling at the life…
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Acknowledgement
Medicine, like Fashion, has its vogues, its conceits if you will. Admittedly less capricious, they are nonetheless as unpredictable. Think, say, of the menopause. Until relatively recently it was largely ignored. There were so many other health issues in a woman’s life, that if she was fortunate enough to survive to the menopause it was seen as…
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Fibroids
I sometimes prefer to call them leiomyomas -it’s more descriptive of a condition that involves muscle cells- or even fibromas. I said this by way of beginning an explanation to a patient who was sent to me for them; she looked at me as if I had just sworn at her -belittled her condition. I hadn’t meant to… “Hiding behind medical…
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