The Short Stories analysis

The Doctor was written about a fellow first year medical student who got on an elevator with a woman seen in the ER and sent to the surgery floor with a note from the ER doctor about her having an attack of cholecystitis (gall bladder stone inflammation). John Sealy Hospital in Galveston, Texas had an old elevator like the one in the story. You could see the walls of the elevator shaft through the metal accordin elevator door as you moved through the floors-Scary.

Anna with the Stomachache was an actual patient I saw while moonlighting in Minnesota during my residency. I was afraid of her mother and didn’t ask the right questions to sort out what was really wrong with her deaughter. I saw the girl again while making rounds seven months later. She had a beautiful daughter. I wonder what her mother, “arms the size of hammocks” did when she really found out what was wrong with her daughter when I first saw her.

The Old Woman was taken from a lyric on the first Art Garfunkel album after he broke up with Paul Simon. I was sitting on the floor shining my shoes listening to the music while I was in the Navy in San Diego and Art sang the line, “you might have seen Jesus and never known who you saw.” My imagination took the story from there.

Farmer Brown was another story from when I was a resident in neurology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. The patient presented with leg weakness and appeared to have a polyneuropathy-absent leg reflexes, decreased pin and vibration perception in his feet and legs. My friend and fellow resident stole a cookie from a tray in the patient’s room.

The Man who could do JFK  was a story told to me by my college roommate about a scene he had witnessed in a bar.

A Story of Syphilis was a story I heard from a fellow staff neurologist while I was at Balboa Hospital in San Diego. Doctors worry about treating syphilis and you never really know the whole story about the relationships that are involved .