01-12-2010 | Healing Arts: Materia Medica
Becoming a Father
Published in: Journal of General Internal Medicine | Issue 12/2010
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His e-mail arrived in my inbox folder with little fanfare, like the faintest tugging on my lab coat. The generic title, “Medical Advice,” blended in and nestled so comfortably between the numerous other e-mails that it might otherwise have slipped unnoticed into my spam folder. But the text of this message was different, the words deliberate and dire, desperately begging for me to stop what I was doing and pay attention to him.…“I know you don’t know me,” the first line read, “but my name is James. I’m 25 years old, live in Florida and I have AIDS. My doctors here are giving me medications that are making me sick and I don’t think they know what they are doing. Please, I need your help.”