Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue (Hardcover)

by Danielle Ofri (Author) "AIR FRANCE," she says..." (more)
Key Phrases: developer fluid, lung markings, blood tubes, Adrienne Berneau, Carnegie Hall, Herbert Ziff (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
These essays, some previously published, about the author's 10 years as a medical student, intern and resident at the oldest public hospital in the U.S. resonate with insight, intelligence, humor and an extraordinary sensitivity to both the patients she treated in this inner-city facility and the staff she worked with. The cofounder and editor-in-chief of a literary magazine, the Bellevue Review, Ofri is now an attending physician at Bellevue and brings to this memoir a combination of medical information and some very expressive writing. The author acknowledges that when she arrived to work on the wards, she had no idea what her responsibilities were or how to perform typical student tasks like drawing blood. Along with the technical skills she absorbed working overtime in a stressful atmosphere, Ofri also learned to truly care for her cases. In "Finding the Person," she describes, for example, why she continued to speak to and maintain a bedside manner with a comatose woman in front of the dying woman's family. "Intensive Care" recounts the story of Dr. Sitkin, a difficult supervisor who both alienated and won the respect of his medical team, and eventually took his own life. The tragic loss of her close friend Josh, a 27-year-old, who died from a congenital heart condition ("The Burden of Knowledge"), caused her to doubt the foundation of medical training, that knowledge is power. The pieces in this powerful collection are tied together by the struggle of a clearly gifted physician to master the complexities of healing.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The New England Journal of Medicine
Bellevue Hospital, probably the oldest hospital in America, began to serve George II's New York subjects in 1736 as a Public Workhouse and House of Correction with six beds for the sick. Included in the cost of construction were 50 gallons of rum. Forced by an epidemic of yellow fever to escape the filth of central Manhattan in 1794, the almshouse-prison-hospital complex found a haven at Belle Vue, an estate overlooking the East River. Bellevue became a teaching hospital, first by shedding its poorhouse and penitentiary and then, in 1847, by opening its doors to medical students. The horse-drawn wagons of the world's first hospital-based ambulance service began to clatter out of Bellevue in 1869, and four years later the hospital opened America's first nursing school. Over the ensuing years, Bellevue evolved into a behemoth built of bricks the color of dried blood, one side facing the East River, the other looming over First Avenue and 27th Street (Figure). In the 1950s, New York University medical students, of which I was one, thought it was the greatest hospital in the world's greatest city. The Old Bellevue is now a worn-out hulk occupied mainly by administrators. Its clinical services were transferred to the New Bellevue in 1973, and a part of the former poorhouse is undergoing conversion into a center for biomedical research. Now, 30 years after the Old Bellevue closed its doors to the sick, Danielle Ofri recounts in Singular Intimacies how it was to be a medical student and resident at the New Bellevue and how it is to serve the grande dame of New York medicine as an attending physician. Ofri is a gifted writer. Her vignettes ring with truth, and for any physician or patient who knows the dramas of a big-city hospital they will evoke tears, laughter, and memories. Indeed, any reader, physician or not, will find in Singular Intimacies the essence of becoming and being a doctor. Ofri's prologue tells the story of a 62-year-old French woman with lung cancer who, gasping for breath, gives the intensive care unit (ICU) team her final orders through an oxygen mask. "Air France," she says. "No other airline. My body must fly to Paris via Air France. . . . No ceremony before the interment . . . just a burial at Rue de la Colonnade." Ofri writes, "We file out of the room . . . our hands dangling awkward and useless, our tears threatening to give way." Ofri's epilogue reveals that after a week in the ICU, her French patient's pulmonary infiltrates and hypoxia gave way to antibiotics. "There was no sweeter music than that silvery Parisian accent floating into my ears. . . . The arc of her words shimmered in the air and her history settled softly into mine." Little wonder that Danielle Ofri is editor-in-chief of the Bellevue Literary Revue. Then there is "The Professor of Denial," a psychiatrist who is clearly in the terminal stages of an intraabdominal cancer but does not have a tissue diagnosis. The psychiatrist insists to the end that he has viral hepatitis. Despite obvious signs of his patient's impending death, Dr. Gursky, the attending physician, demands one invasive diagnostic procedure after another, including a laparotomy, to get the answer. All to no avail. Ofri's anguish at having to carry out Gursky's orders is the only point of clarity in this story. One wonders who was in denial -- the patient or Dr. Gursky. Ofri writes about Mrs. Whitney from South Carolina, whose brain lost its cortical function after she collapsed from cardiac arrest while visiting her daughter in New York. All the frustrations of caring for a patient in a vegetative state in the cardiac care unit of Bellevue Hospital and dealing with her family are examined. "It's just a coincidence that her eyes sometimes move toward you when you speak. But her cortex can't process anything they're seeing. I . . . I'm sorry." The arresting aspect of the story is Ofri's respect for the unseeing, unfeeling Mrs. Whitney and her hope that the staff that will continue Mrs. Whitney's care will "find the person within the patient." In these and 13 other stories, Ofri distills the terrors, frustrations, and joys of her life as a student and physician at Bellevue. Above all, Ofri has the precious gift of humility. It is this quality that graces her prose, transforming it from mere storytelling into memorable parables. Robert S. Schwartz, M.D.
Copyright © 2003 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 246 pages
• Publisher: Beacon Press; 1 edition (April 15, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807072524
• ISBN-13: 978-0807072523
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (48 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #795,863 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Touching, September 4, 2003

By	Juniper Breeze (NYC) - See all my reviews

I am currently an intern in my first year of training at Bellevue. This book was given to me as a present upon my recent graduation from medical school. Although internship does not provide much time for pleasure reading, I am very glad I stayed up at night to read this book. Dr. Ofri is wise and caring. Her willingness to share her insecurities and imperfections is rare in the world of medicine where admissions of weakness are rare. Unlike a number of other senior and jaded doctors I have met, Dr. Ofri has not lost the caring and excitement for medicine everyone has when they begin medical school. Anyone involved in the medical profession will immediately relate to these aspects of the book.

For readers not involved in medicine, the book will still be wonderful to read. It is beautifully written, and all readers will be able to relate to the human drama Dr. Ofri presents. Although I have yet to meet Dr. Ofri in person, I hope that when I am done with my training at Bellevue, I will have a fraction of her passion and compassion.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars From the heart and from the mind, May 5, 2004

By	Sarah Bain (Spokane, WA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue (Paperback)

This is not a book to take lightly. This is a book about real people, with real problems. This is a book written by a doctor who takes nothing about what she does lightly.
Dr. Ofri takes the sacred--a person and his/her life--and offers us a glimpse into the patient's world and the doctor's world in a poetic, gorgeous book that offers us both rare insight about ourselves and insight about human beings in general.
Each essay describes a moment in time, a look at Dr. Ofri's residency at Bellevue Hospital, a glimpse of one or more of her patients, and a glance toward the human condition and how it can be both transformational and devasting.
Dr. Ofri takes the mundane--an alcoholic arriving in the ER from too much imbibing--and transforms the story into one that will stay with you for the rest of your life.
I am not a doctor, I am not a scientist. I am an ordinary person who will never again look ordinarily at any person whether I see them in a hospital bed or posted as a missing person on a flyer.
Perhaps what sets Dr. Ofri apart is that she is a doctor, a wife, a mother. But I hope not. I hope that every doctor could aspire to having access to both sides of his/her brain, to show emotion and to offer solace in a way that Dr. Ofri has.
This is a must read for anyone in the medical field and a must read for anyone who aspires to have a deeper connection in any relationship with any person.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Strong Writing and Great Stories, November 28, 2003

By	Richard M. Berlin (Richmond, MA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Singular Intimacies

If you have ever wondered what medical training is like, if you have ever fantasized about becoming a doctor, or if you just love strong writing and great stories, this is a book for you.

Singular Intimacies takes us inside the emotional and intellectual heart of a doctor as she makes her journey from medical student to resident physician during her training at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. As a physician and poet who learned to practice medicine at similar inner-city hospitals, I can assure any reader that Dr. Ofri's descriptions of the clinical situations she encounters (including the array of patients, diagnostic dilemmas, clinical conversations, and moments of genuine love and exhilaration), all ring true for me: patients recover unexpectedly from what seem to be fatal illnesses; they die without warning and without having an accurate diagnosis; and they laugh, bleed, masturbate, cooperate, and act up in every imaginable (and unimaginable) way. Through all these experiences, Dr. Ofri shares her own personal responses which vary from her sense of pride when she begins to experience a sense of mastery, to moments of intense anxiety and despair. I found myself re-experiencing my own excitement, fear, and sleep-deprivation, only this time with a compassionate guide, one who is strong enough to let herself laugh at gallows humor, and also be vulnerable enough to cry in the arms of a priest as the patient's family watches. And I celebrated when Dr. Ofri finally finished her training , bruised and calloused, but with the compassionate heart and voice of a healer.