“I take care of people, not patients,” the doctor self-righteously announced before asking his question of the panel of speakers. We were sitting in a conference about how primary care doctors and nephrologists could use health information technology to provide better care to patients with chronic kidney disease. “When did ‘patient’ become a dirty word?” I asked my colleague sitting next to me.
i hear you
i wanna dance with somebody
It was a day of rounding on my dialysis patients with routine monthly lab results in hand. My patient, Book of Eli Denzel Doppelgänger, was doing better. His last several months of adjusting to being on dialysis after years of hoping he would never have to, had been slow going. “I’m realizing that this is a life and death situation,” he said to me in those first few weeks after starting dialysis.
welcome home
We sat on opposite sides of the 4-lane highway waiting for the red light to change. I sat in my air-conditioned white rental car with my left turn signal blinking green on the dashboard. I was on my way back to my North Carolina family home, where I had been secluding myself to write my book.