Opinion: ‘Stuck in a tornado of life’: a patient’s chaos narrative
Medicine prides itself on the pretense of control. The unmoored storylines of chaos narratives threaten the safety of this paradigm and cut through clinicians' psychic defenses. Everyone is vulnerable to…
Cheryl overdosed on heroin — or so she’d hoped — the night before. But that’s not the reason she’s in the emergency department late the next day with me sitting at her gurney, confused.
She woke up this morning so upset to be alive she kicked a wall at the homeless shelter and broke her toe. But that’s not why she’s in the ED, either.
Something came up a few weeks ago that made her miss her appointment at the methadone clinic. That absence got her kicked out of the clinic for 30 days, or so she said. The withdrawal symptoms made her want to die, and returning to heroin was the
