She was my first real patient. Before the pandemic, I regularly saw her at my family medicine clerkship for routine follow-ups. Always accompanied by her adoring daughter and designated caretaker, they would teasingly call me “baby-doc” as I fumbled with my stethoscope.
Now, almost a year later, I was holding her small bowel between my gloved fingers under the bright lights of the OR. As I ran my hand down the loops of intestine, I felt crunching– “I think I feel pneumatosis intestinalis,” I said to the surgeon. He met my hand at its place on her bowel and felt. “The kid is good,” he said to the scrub nurse, “nice catch!” Oh the validation of a correct diagnosis. Though eager excitement quickly made way for dread. I knew what this meant. Her intestines were dying, she was at the end of the road.
We met again 7 days ago in the emergency room when I was on-call. Fear of coming to a hospital full of COVID left her in agony for months as she ignored early signs of her dying organs. Serendipity or fate, when she did finally come for help, I was there.
I was with her in the hospital room, where she laid helpless, vulnerable and scared. I was with her in the OR where she laid open, vulnerable and exposed. Balancing the duality of humanity and science, I held her daughter’s hand after each surgery and translated the surgeon’s medical jargon. I was the last person she talked to, giving soothing words as the anesthesiologist put her under, never to awaken again.
Her final days were spent unconscious and intubated in the ICU. Her daughter was by her side every day, for as many hours as COVID policy allowed. Between patients, I would go down and visit them. We would sit and I would listen to her daughter tell stories of her kind and quick-witted mother.
On the final day of my Surgery rotation, and what I would later discover would be her final day of life, I wrote her family a letter. Simply to share how grateful I was to have learned from their mother’s case, wishing them peace in the soon-to-be passing, and offering whatever soliloquy of comfort I could. It was a simple gesture, one that I figured would be met with a few moments of gratitude and then slip to the back of their consciousness and forgotten in grief. Months later, her daughter would reach out to me to share how impactful that simple gesture was for her family’s coping.
I chose medicine, because in no other field are you stretched to be both so technically proficient and emotionally vulnerable. The science of medicine is constantly infused with the raw emotion and heavy responsibility of having a human life in your hands. To have such privilege is a beautiful burden.