When I am years into clinical work, whether in the sleep-deprived drudges of residency or with my training long behind me,
When I have come face to face with the ugly sides of the medical-industrial bureaucracy and our greedy, racist, broken system,
When I have lost count of patients I have seen pass away and I must inevitably reckon with my failure to do the best for others,
When personal concerns have drawn my passions away from work,
And when for all these reasons I am consequently at risk of becoming numb to the emotional and spiritual lives of the people under my care,
I hope to remember from my clerkship year:
The counsel of a patient my age, also studying to be a healthcare professional and yet suffering from an autoimmune disease, who emphasized that hospitalization from the patient’s perspective changes everything. “You don’t know how it feels to choose between your health and your livelihood,” he remarked in reference to the immense financial burden. He encouraged me to take time to talk with patients and to come down to eye level with them during rounds, for in these ways, he said, “you can make a small dent in their lives.”
Valentine’s Day in the ICU, where in one room, a gorgeous bouquet of roses and a young man with red-rimmed eyes accompanied a sedated and intubated patient.
Tears on the cheek of another intubated patient as the doctor broke news of a medical complication to him, for while it was not initially obvious that he was conscious, it became clear he heard every word. Photos of his children looked on from the walls.
A young couple’s celebratory embrace and literal skips and jumps down the office hall after seeing their baby on ultrasound for the first time! “We did it!” Mom beamed with a high-five to her husband.
Two sisters’ dramatic debut into the world via a C-section delivery, their small cries mingling from their bassinets, their toes like fine small round peas. Their mother’s face glowed with joy and love even as a liter of her blood collected in the surgical drape.
The silent, oppressive grief dominating the room of a woman experiencing surgical complications after losing her baby, her windowsill lined with flowers given as a grasp at condolences.
How a college student brought to the ED by her friends out of concern for suicidality, though deep in suffering, brightened and straightened in describing her passion for social justice.
The dignity and courage with which a patient faced a future of progressive neurologic disease, his sister overcome with emotion in recounting his goodness, grace, and love.
The anguish of a man presenting to the suboxone clinic in the midst of his struggle with opioid use, explaining that he has been made to feel like a bad person when all he desired was to be well.
The portrait of a fiercely independent, strong-willed, and loving mother depicted to me over the phone by a son making impossible decisions about her code status, which transformed my understanding of the woman who laid before me bedridden and delirious in the final days of her life.
A father’s forehead pressed tight to his daughter’s as she screamed and cried during placement of an IV. “You have to be tough,” he implored her at first, but as her distress grew, he softened, sighed, with her head in his hands. “I wouldn’t want to get a shot either, baby,” he said, “but sometimes we have to get them.”
The silence, then the sound of a family learning of the death of their child due to an unforeseen postoperative complication, how the primary attending on service wept with them, and how the consultant delivering the news went on from the family meeting stone-faced, as if nothing had happened.
And I hope that I might still be moved.
Justine Wang is an MS3 at the Perelman School of Medicine.
Art by Jasmine Larrick, an MS1 at the Perelman School of Medicine.
