The airline passenger who refused to allow a security pat-down made national headlines quickly. The idea of a stranger touching a person’s intimate areas makes most people cringe. But something like this occurs every day in the doctor’s office.
The airline passenger who refused to allow a security pat-down made national headlines quickly. The idea of a stranger touching a person’s intimate areas makes most people cringe. But something like this occurs every day in the doctor’s office.
"Bitter winds churned up First Avenue and tore through the pathetically thin scrubs that Bellevue doled out to its interns. The December sky glowered the same leaden-green color of the bile that Dr. Kamal Singh was siphoning from the gut of Mr. Bill Porter, a homeless alcoholic with a Southern accent, a jauntily curled mustache…
Status quo is a powerful determinant of both belief and behavior. Many of the things we do and the things we believe in transpire because they are what we have always done or believed. This is why incumbents win elections, why we always choose the same flavor of yogurt, why we take the same route…
“One-dollar roses?” She says it with a slight inflection at the end, so that it sounds like a question. “One-dollar roses?” There is a waif-like tenderness to her throaty voice. Is she a shrewd businesswoman, or is that just the way she speaks? Either way, you can’t help but look at her. It would be…
by Danielle Ofri ©Beacon Press, 2009 Note: ” “Merced” first appeared in The Missouri Review, then in Best American Essays, 2002, and then in Danielle’s book Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue. “This is a case of a 23 year-old Hispanic female, without significant past medical history, who presented to Bellevue Hospital complaining of…
8:30 a.m. Doing intakes—interviews with new patients to the clinic. First one is Carola Castaña, a petite thirty-five-year-old Brazilian who immigrated to the United States three months ago. She folds her hands in her lap as I begin to take her history. She understands my questions better if I ask in Spanish rather than English,…
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