Case and Stories

The narratives in medicine

Suzanne Koven practices at Massachusetts General Hospital and teaches at Harvard Medical School. See full bio

November 4, 2009

I'm Getting Bossy About Flu Shots

My patients will tell you that I am pretty laissez faire as doctors go. I have enough respect for people's ability to make good decisions about their own lives and enough humility about the limits of medical certainty to support my patients' choices- even when they choose not to follow my recommendations. Read More

June 25, 2009

Is It Ever Okay to Be Unhappy?

My patient Jim, as I’ll call him, fears that he’s about to lose his job, though he actually hates his job and dreads keeping it almost as much as losing it. Thirty five years old with a pregnant wife and two year old son at home, Jim feels anxious, sleeps poorly, suffers from stomach pains and frequent headaches. Plus, his two-year old is an obstinate terror and Jim had not been nearly as eager as his wife to have another child. Jim comes to my office not so much to discuss these problems but to ask me whether I can prescribe something to calm him down. Read More

May 25, 2009

A Victim of Swine Flu: A Doctor's Sense of Invulnerability

My medical colleagues are very busy people, too busy to bother with italics (or even much punctuation) in e-mails, so I knew something was seriously wrong when a physician who happens to be my patient wrote to tell me that "something bad...something really, really bad" had happened to him. Read More

April 27, 2009

Hypochondriacs Get Sick,Too

Jerry insisted his eyes were yellow, but they didn't appear yellow to me. I moved in for a closer look. Fluorescent lights like those in the office where I practice internal medicine can make subtle jaundice, a sign of liver disease, difficult to detect. No, his sclerae were as white as mine and, as usual, Jerry seemed to have absolutely wrong with him. Read More

April 13, 2009

My Mother, My Weight

My patient--I'll call her Amy--was heavy. Her mother, Sybil, also my patient, was thin. At Amy's visits to my office we always discussed her weight. At Sybil's visits Amy's weight also came up frequently. Read More

April 5, 2009

He Said/She Didn't

I was new in practice. They were young - even younger than I. Yet they seemed as attached to one another as a much older couple. Read More

March 29, 2009

Mrs. O'Malley Isn't Dying Just Yet

New patients usually come to my internal medicine practice for one of three reasons: they’re unhappy with their previous doctor, they’ve outgrown their pediatrician, or they’re new in town. Of these three, only the last gives me no trepidation. Unhappy patients may become unhappy with me, after all, and eighteen year olds frequently arrive attached to anxious parents. Read More

March 23, 2009

A Case... and a Story

My first "patient" was a big and kindly man named Ronald Blake. I put "patient" in quotation marks because I met Mr. Blake when I was a first year medical student, with neither the skills nor experience to offer him any medical help whatsoever. In fact, Mr. Blake was enlisted to help me. Read More

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