Realization and Repentance
July 26, 2007
13 hour days are long. After arriving at the hospital around 4:45am, something hits you around 3pm, and the last two hours of the day seem to drag into eternity. It was in this time that I was called in to watch a delivery. A teen pregnancy, and the father had recently passed away from an accidental death. For all intents and purposes, it should have been a grim scene. To my surprise, however, that was the last adjective I would ever use to describe the events of the next half hour. Mom and Grandma were there, presiding over the laboring girl with a camcorder and a camera. Big brother was there as well, giving a (to me) much needed masculine balance to the family dynamic.
The first thing that struck me was the strength and cohesiveness of their family unit. As a facility that participates in much indigent care, we see many young women come in to deliver their babies alone, and it truly breaks my heart. The strength of these women, however, has been no less than flabbergasting. Yet, I digress. It was a strong, nurturing atmosphere that surrounded this young women.
A relatively uneventful delivery later, the baby was out. Mom and Grandma rushed around, tears in their eyes, struggling to get perfect video footage and pictures of the first moment of this young man’s life. After the nurses cleaned him off and weighed him, he was delivered to his exhausted mother. Then, something happened. As she held him in her arms for the first time, her eyes half glazed from the pain of the past few hours, I stood transfixed, unable to rip my focus from her. Her face was serene, but the tidal wave of emotion behind her eyes was unmistakable. The terrible ferocity of her love, combined with its unrelenting tenderness, was a paradox too beautiful to comprehend, yet almost too fundamental to be thought about. It was as if the entirety of human existence could be summed up in that moment, with that mother clutching her newborn to her side. Nothing else could have mattered, nothing else should have mattered.
I don’t know how long I stared. It could have been 5 seconds, it could have been 5 years. It doesn’t matter. I was witnessing the most beautiful thing in the world, and very little could have torn my attention from it. But then, a most surprising thing happened to me…I was hit, hard, with a wave of guilt.
Every person I’ve ever hurt, every girl I’ve ever mistreated, every person I’ve mocked….they were once that tiny human being, being looked upon by their new mother with passionate affection passing all human bounds. In an existential sense, I was hurting that little person, damaging that thing that the woman in front of me held so precious.
And so, I repent. To everyone who can say that knowing me was a damaging influence in your lives, I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I have sinned against God and against man, and for it I repent, and ask forgiveness. I have changed so much in the past 2 months, and this is a giant leap. No longer can I lead a life that leads me here. No longer can I be a cause of pain to that tiny child, who is at once everyone and no one, the striking figure of passionate, personal anonymity.
A death
July 21, 2007
Clinic today. I checked a woman who was 12 weeks pregnant. Her uterus was small for that gestational age. To ultrasound we go, only to fail to see a heartbeat or fetal movement. I was there when she found out her baby was dead. She cried. I cried. I tried to hold it back, but I just couldn’t. Words seemed useless, so I just held her shoulder and whispered my best “lo siento, senora.” Luckily, it was time to go back to the hospital. I sobbed most of the way there. My problems seem so stupid and small.
Got my step score today. Satisfied. Quite. I don’t really know how to not be worried about it any more.
A late-afternoon surgery with a young attending. After the brass is gone, he has the nurse turn on the radio. Bush- Glycerine. Awesome. The OR instantly transformed from cold, sterile, heartless to just a room where workers are working. Medicine needs more music.
Surgery, post-op, recovery. I can’t imagine how boring this whole process must be for a patient. Your meds put you to sleep at random times, leaving you wide awake with nothing happening at 3am. Some patients get visibly excited when we enter the room, as they are parched for company. I feel good about those times.
I’ve said this before….but for a lot of my life, I have been a complainer. I complain about a lot, I think. Yet, for the most part, I have surrounded myself with mainly positive people who are quite different than I, and don’t really complain. Recently, I have been around some folks who complain (arguably more than I) and it has really been an eye-opening experience. Its annoying. Thoroughly annoying. I realize now how exhausting it must have been hanging around me when I was complaining. I’m going to change that.
“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
It is 1:47am. As of right now, I have slept for 3 of the past 48 hours, and worked for over 40 of them. I am tired. Profoundly, deeply tired. And yet, I find myself unable to sleep for reasons that would otherwise seem ridiculous. Nietzsche was right.
That, and we are not supposed to sleep on call if we want to honor the rotation. Sadists.
It feels like its never going to stop raining. Oh well, I would probably resent the sunshine even more. Cutting and stitching; its an art, and I saw an artist practice today. A thing of beauty, how a man can flay another human being open, repair them, and sew his way out. Still moderately beyond my comprehension. She had a pretty name.
A patient has what appears to be a rare skin condition. “She needs a derm consult,” the resident says aloud, to which the chief scoffs “Shes on medicaid, good luck with getting a dermatologist to see her.”
I know and recognize that medicine is a business, and that nothing exist sans the money to run it, but this is kind of silly. It seems as if most specialties see the beauty and necessity of pro bono work, but that simply isn’t the rule for the derm folks, apparently. Oh well.
Tears on an operating table. Clear sparkles over red corneas. A touch of humanity before anasthesia turned her into a piece of meat. She didn’t speak much english, but I tried to reassure her as the propofol took hold. I wonder if she understood.
