I feel terrible,” she said. “I can’t sleep, I cry all the time, and I don’t want to do anything around the house.” Her symptoms seemed mind-numbingly mundane. I’d heard a dozen similar stories in the past week alone, probably thousands over the years, and I had to remind myself that for her, this was a singular experience. She’d never felt anything like it. I dictated my note in a practiced...
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Kate did not want to specialize in psychiatry. “It just doesn’t grab me,” she said. I appreciated her candor, since most medical students profess a passing interest in psychiatry, or do so at least until their evaluations are in. I knew the statistics—less than 5% of medical students choose to specialize in psychiatry. We were, it seemed to me sometimes, the pariahs of the medical community. But Kate was...
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Rodriguez was liberal with the tequila, which probably accounted for the fact that I was talking as much as anyone else at the party, even though I know only 2 words of Spanish, one of which is hola. Language barriers notwithstanding, I was having a great time. “Gracias,” I said, thanking Rafael, a friend of mine, an internist originally from Peru, for inviting me to this party. In India, I’d taken my...
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I knocked on Xao’s door. He greeted me in a flat voice, a bespectacled man who looked younger than his 33 years. I tried to picture him as he was in the ER all those years ago: This is a 24-year-old Chinese male University School of Medicine,brought in by the police after he went on a rampage with a meat cleaver. He is stained in blood and is belligerent and aggressive. . . . The ER physician had obviously...
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