Search

Lay persons might think physicians spend all their time in hospitals or clinics or that physicians fly their private jets to exclusive resorts for long weekends. But physicians are regular people just like their patients, and, when not on the job, they do many of the same things for the same reasons: playing with pets and doing sports, music, and art. Physicians might not have a blue-ribbon dog, might not have played varsity basketball in college, might not have gone to Julliard before medical school, might not have had one-person exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but what they do when they are not wearing their white coats can make them better physicians when they put the coats back on again. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poetry and Medicine Eight days after they had cut into my chest, put me on a bypass pump, excised a valve consumed by Staph, stitched a new one in I read what they had said about the scan of my head two weeks before. Footnotes 1 Article InformationCorresponding Author: Joseph Gascho, MD ().Conflict of Interest Disclosures: None reported. "Innumerable" I read, "Septic emboli" I read, "to both cerebral hemispheres.". [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the author's experiences with the medical condition tic douloureux (trigeminal neuralgia) and microvascular decompression surgery, and it mentions the late writer Ernest Hemingway's claim that seven-eighths of the reality of any given event lies beneath the surface. Right eye pain treatment and trigeminal nerve abnormalities are examined, along with patient-physician relations and pain's impact on autonomy.