If you were from Charlotte North Carolina in the 1980’s you knew three things: NASCAR, Tobacco, and the PTL Club and they all went together, loosely. NASCAR and Tobacco are acquired tastes but one could not help but be fatally drawn to the spectacle of Jim and Tammy Faye…

I’m Not Your Friend, I’m Your Advocate I should have known. The year was 2001. I was on the way to work and NPR was doing a story on the “Epidemic of Untreated Pain”. Multiple studies published in journals I don’t read were clear that nationally, pain was not…

Mental illness is not a casserole disease. You can stand up at Wednesday night prayer meeting and say, “please pray for my grandmother, she has cancer”. You can post on FaceBook that you had a heart attack and then everyone feels bad and brings you lasagna. When you stand up…

Dear Grammar matrons, I sit corrected. Thank you for pointing out my obvious grammatical and spelling and other errors. I still don’t know what those errors are. I suspect errors of tense. I’ve written 20 stories for Medium, I have 208 followers and have cashed checks from Medium totaling $204.56…

My best high school friend Mark and we’ll call him Mark because that’s his name.The decade was the 80’s and we were Baptist making us confident of most things and certain of the rest. Baptist’s share a common trait with Catholics and Jewish folks and that is guilt. We…

Doc, one more thing. Shut the door. I had known this man for two decades and to say he was complex was unfair. He was a labyrinth of tangled self-induced misfortune. He was smart, he was proud and his choices were always poor. His father loved him as only a…

I operated on a young man last month. While visiting him afterwards he was very appreciative of my work and care and the like. I allowed those compliments to wash over me as any surgeon whose done their job for 25 years does. I asked if he’d had his Covid-19…

“Son, these are the best days of your life, you just don’t know it yet,” that was his response to my mumbled defense. I was attempting to assist Dr. John as a 25 year old freshly minted intern. Dr. John Ochsner remains the best technical surgeon I’ve ever seen but…

“Intern to the Ramp,” it was my turn. Charity Hospital New Orleans 1992 and I’d been dodging this moment. I’d seen dead old people which is no big deal, long life bad heart you smoke you will die. We all die eventually or so it seems except for Elisha and…