Memories, Medicine & Moods
Blogs
- 3/14/2025
A visit from the Office de la langue française
They entered her small office, argued for a moment whether it was OK to leave a child’s drawing captioned with ‘I love you Dr. M.’ on the wall. My doctor asked them if they thought that this activity was a productive way to use taxpayer dollars. - 3/3/2025
An act of kindness
‘I looked at my patient. The narcotic was working. Thankful for my small hand, I reached into the uterus and felt along the half-contracted wall. I found what I was looking for.’ - 1/14/2025
Turkish delight rolls
Dr. Perle Feldman tells the story of how her father finally decided to quit smoking. - 12/20/2024
A Christmas ghost story
Well before she was an MD, Dr. Perle Feldman volunteered at the Montreal Youth Clinic, meeting some colourful characters along the way. - 11/29/2024
Passing the family medicine torch from mother to daughter
I'm sitting on the couch completing the charts I've dragged home from the office. Age 14, my daughter Emma confronts me with the eyeroll and contemptuous drawl of the young teenager. “Don’t think I’m ever going to be a doctor, Mom!” - 10/21/2024
New year, old stories
Deliver a baby, get screamed at, all before coffee. All in a holy day’s work - 8/26/2024
Things that could fall apart
When I was a medical student back in the late '70s, the gay people in my class kept a very low profile. They lived in fear of being outed which could have terrible consequences harassment, blackmail even being dismissed from the program. - 8/13/2024
Medical Student Disease changes with age, but doesn’t disappear
Being a physician is itself a risk factor for health anxiety. Before I started in medicine, I had the general obliviousness towards health which is the natural state of the average 22-year-old. Soon, however, that vanished. - 7/14/2024
You seem discouraged
For the majority of my practice, I've cared for marginalized populations, knowing everyone found this kind of work as rewarding as I do. But there consensus used to be that it needed to be done. Today, in Quebec, the message seems to be, if you don’t speak French, please die. - 5/15/2024
A box of dates
Becoming a mother is a rich and complicated source of emotions—including anxiety. - 5/1/2024
Numerators and denominators
‘Of course, we get all these patients, where the GP has completely missed all those symptoms,’ I heard a specialist say. Needless to say, I was fuming. - 2/15/2024
For the love of Spiderman (and the husbands who read his comics)
Two women, both confronting the untimely mortaility of their husbands, meet in a comic book shop and offer each other real support.