Month: February 2013

The Book of the Week is “Model Patient” by Karen Duffy, published in 2007. In this ebook, Duffy describes her mid to late 1990’s bout with sarcoidosis, a life-threatening illness that is difficult to diagnose.

A prolonged, severe headache was the first symptom. Numerous tests revealed that she had a growing lesion on her brain and spinal cord. This produced numbness and paralysis in various parts of her body, including her limbs. It took months before she saw a doctor who recommended treatment of steroids and chemotherapy. She writes, “I’d lost the playbook to my life. I had no idea what to do.”

Despite the psychological stress brought on by her inability to continue modeling and working as an on-camera reporter for MTV, she did her darndest towork eighteen to twenty-four hours in a row, usually overnight, in a hospital every three days. Every month for an entire year, the interns in this ebook were assigned to a different unit such as pediatrics, neonatal intensive care, or the emergency room, at a medical center in the Bronx in New York City.

The hospital staff was kept busy treating patients with conditions whose causes were poverty-related— people in poor health, and those who suffered physical harm from violence and drugs. Many patients and their families had psychological problems. One intern remarked, “…we have two psychotic crackheads roaming around the ER, we also had two psychotic crackheads who were paranoid and had no idea what was going on, which is a wonderful combination.”

Severely sleep-deprived, along with doing a