Metro Moments
I know no one reads this anymore, myself included but I need to put my rare writings somewhere so here they go
I was up and on the road before even the traffic lights were awake, blinking the steady yellow of their dreams. My mind was used to this predawn routine but my body still protested. The ghosts of yesterday’s humidity scattered before my headlights as I sped south towards the hospital. The edifice gleamed out of the inky sky, like the last two years of my life had been, a destination I’d been journeying towards but not yet arrived. Pulling into the parking lot I realized it truly was a beautiful place that I’d finally reached, 3rd most beautiful hospital, according to the experts. I wondered if that gave the sickest of the sick hope when they reached its gates.
Rounding on patients begins as a digital affair. The glowing screen was new to some but it’d been all I’d ever experienced. A resident told me that not everyone gets discharged but everyone eventually leaves the hospital. Sadly, that was Mr M’s story that morning, the ethereal discharge. Don’t get me wrong, it hadn’t been the first of my patients to pass on, even as a 3rd year medical student fresh from two dimensional medicine that only existed in outdated mnemonics and standardized tests. But this was different. Mr M was the father of a college aged daughter and a husband, not an aged veteran with all of his life and friends behind him and nothing but hospital visits before.
Mr M’s disease was idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and his prognosis was poor. “Idiot-pathic” is a more apt description, meaning that the brightest of medical minds still couldn’t explain its origin. Mr. M’s lungs were as thick as leather bottles, and it took all of his concentrated effort just to inflate them. Some likened it to drowning, but slowly; over weeks. In the scant week that I’d gotten to know him, he’d only grown more agitated, and understandably so. They’d increased his oxygen mask to its highest level, but he was still in pain. The morphine intended to dull his agony only made his breathing more difficult.
Mrs. M was always ghosting around his room or the lobby, wrapped in her heavy crimson coat, suitable for winter despite the oppressive heat that reigned outside. That wasn’t her reality. This hospital was. She was a widow whose grief was suspended, not yet sorrow and not yet moving on. Eventually they’d accepted hospice, the medical term for letting go.
That evening, the air was cool enough for a decent run. It’s funny how precious such opportunities become when medicine demands so much of your time. The familiar slap of the pavement, that steady tempo that timed my breathing, was relaxing after a long day. It was difficult to call a sixty-hour devotion school, yet impossible to call it work without a paycheck at the end of the week. Yet even the tragic moments held a certain beauty. Who’s to say that Mr M’s passing was a devastation and not a release? I continued to race through the lengthening shadows of the historic homes of my neighborhood. In every moment of every run, there comes a point where your body reaches its limit and only your willpower carries you forward to your finish line. To me, that was half the appeal of the sport. I reached that point many blocks from my home; my breath coming hard and my muscles screaming for aerobic metabolism. No one would have blinked an eye had I stopped. No coach would have yelled, or friend broke their own pace to match with my slower one, yet I kept onward. I kept onward for Mr. M. For me there would be an end to this dyspnea. Mr M didn’t have the option to stop, and so for him, I kept onward. For him I kept breathing and noticed the beauty of each painful breath.
I was up and on the road before even the traffic lights were awake, blinking the steady yellow of their dreams. My mind was used to this predawn routine but my body still protested. The ghosts of yesterday’s humidity scattered before my headlights as I sped south towards the hospital. The edifice gleamed out of the inky sky, like the last two years of my life had been, a destination I’d been journeying towards but not yet arrived. Pulling into the parking lot I realized it truly was a beautiful place that I’d finally reached, 3rd most beautiful hospital, according to the experts. I wondered if that gave the sickest of the sick hope when they reached its gates.
Rounding on patients begins as a digital affair. The glowing screen was new to some but it’d been all I’d ever experienced. A resident told me that not everyone gets discharged but everyone eventually leaves the hospital. Sadly, that was Mr M’s story that morning, the ethereal discharge. Don’t get me wrong, it hadn’t been the first of my patients to pass on, even as a 3rd year medical student fresh from two dimensional medicine that only existed in outdated mnemonics and standardized tests. But this was different. Mr M was the father of a college aged daughter and a husband, not an aged veteran with all of his life and friends behind him and nothing but hospital visits before.
Mr M’s disease was idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and his prognosis was poor. “Idiot-pathic” is a more apt description, meaning that the brightest of medical minds still couldn’t explain its origin. Mr. M’s lungs were as thick as leather bottles, and it took all of his concentrated effort just to inflate them. Some likened it to drowning, but slowly; over weeks. In the scant week that I’d gotten to know him, he’d only grown more agitated, and understandably so. They’d increased his oxygen mask to its highest level, but he was still in pain. The morphine intended to dull his agony only made his breathing more difficult.
Mrs. M was always ghosting around his room or the lobby, wrapped in her heavy crimson coat, suitable for winter despite the oppressive heat that reigned outside. That wasn’t her reality. This hospital was. She was a widow whose grief was suspended, not yet sorrow and not yet moving on. Eventually they’d accepted hospice, the medical term for letting go.
That evening, the air was cool enough for a decent run. It’s funny how precious such opportunities become when medicine demands so much of your time. The familiar slap of the pavement, that steady tempo that timed my breathing, was relaxing after a long day. It was difficult to call a sixty-hour devotion school, yet impossible to call it work without a paycheck at the end of the week. Yet even the tragic moments held a certain beauty. Who’s to say that Mr M’s passing was a devastation and not a release? I continued to race through the lengthening shadows of the historic homes of my neighborhood. In every moment of every run, there comes a point where your body reaches its limit and only your willpower carries you forward to your finish line. To me, that was half the appeal of the sport. I reached that point many blocks from my home; my breath coming hard and my muscles screaming for aerobic metabolism. No one would have blinked an eye had I stopped. No coach would have yelled, or friend broke their own pace to match with my slower one, yet I kept onward. I kept onward for Mr. M. For me there would be an end to this dyspnea. Mr M didn’t have the option to stop, and so for him, I kept onward. For him I kept breathing and noticed the beauty of each painful breath.