I'll never forget the first person I watched die. It was a 14 year old girl in PICU. I watched from outside the room as the doctors and nurses did CPR and then called it. I remember thinking even then how surreal it all seemed. There was no thunder, no noise or great sign that this body that once contained a soul did so no longer. It seemed like the earth should have stopped that it should have been a bigger deal...One moment this girl was alive and now she wasn't.
Well I thought that again this past week. One night around 11pm we got the call- "TRAUMA ALERT EMERGENCY ROOM...TRAUMA ALERT EMERGENCY ROOM". Turns out a guy had been shot multiple times- he came in on life flight and the Trauma docs' started to work on him right away. These are the moments we live for as physicians (and future physicians) something exciting and thrilling...something different from the normal diabetes, high blood pressure, and back pain.
I got in the room after they had already cracked this guys chest open. I stood there eagerly watching them suction the blood out of his chest cavity, relishing watching the lungs inflate and deflate. They pulled the heart out and found that the bullet had completely destroyed his Right atrium- beyond repair. The guy had been without a pulse for quite a while and there in the middle of all the chaos the surgeon called time of death. We were all still looking at the guy's heart, marveling at the cracked chest. There was something thrilling and exciting...it was like a present that we were all so excited to see. It wasn't like on ER where all of a sudden all things quiet down, there was still a flurry of activity and nothign really changed except that a few minutes before this guy was "alive" and now he was "dead".
I don't mean to say this patient and his family weren't treated with dignity...they were. But for quite a while it was easy to forget that he was someones son, brother, friend...and to just focus on how exciting it was to see inside his chest cavity. That's when it hit me...I had forgotten to pray for his soul. In the middle of all of this I wasn't praying for him or concerning myself with his family- and even afterwards I went back to work like nothing had happened- I concerned myself with getting closer so I could see the hole in his heart. That's what makes me so sad...this wasn't something that impacted me except I thought it was neat I got to see his chest.
Shouldn't I have cared that this man died? shouldn't I have prayed for him (which I did later)? shouldn't the earth have made some sign that where there once was life there was no more? It just scares me that death leaves no trace...it just happens quietly with no fanfare. It scares me that I forgot about him as a living person and only saw him as something neat I got to see on a Saturday night.
I continue to see the affirmation of my career in medicine (I mean how many people who don't go into medicine think a cracked chest is the neatest thing in the world)...I just pray I can continue to see patients as people- as Christ in distressing disguise and not as objects. But to some extent I think we have to distance ourselves from the patients- from their humanity. We have to preserve ourselves.
Lord, give me the grace to balance my academic interest in medicine and my recognition of you in every patient I encounter!!
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