keeper

i am a keeper of people's stories.

there are so many of them, and they are so amazing, good or bad. i am filled with these stories and i feel more like an anthropologist or a sociologist than a doctor.

everyday i wake up and try to have the energy to listen and care and try not to ask directed questions so that the handsome 28 year old man who was in a motorcycle accident and lost his leg could tell me how his mother died of lung cancer the same year that his cerebral palsy suffering sister accidentally suffocated in her bed.

i found out today that the father of a patient i know very well has a restraining order against his son. he has been at this young man's bedside almost everyday and has done everything to help him feel less alone. he brings supplies to the hospital and cooks food for his son who complains he can't stand to eat what the hospital offers. i have seen him cry many times, holding so much suffering in his eyes.

and i didn't even know the whole story. that his son had done something so frightening that it caused him to take legal action to protect himself. now he is re-married, has other young children, and is trying to live with the burden of an abusive son.

and he is at the bedside, everyday.

i leave my coat at the hospital, and with it i try to leave much of the heaviness that i observe in people...but i can't quite shed it. i dream and the landscape is peopled with my patients.

so i will hold onto to these stories, and continue to feel that it's an honor...i just hope it doesn't become too much.

the ones that made it

i have so many stories that i have neglected to tell.

i have a few good ones, with good outcomes, which i want to relay.

last night was my last night of trauma call for a while, and it was good beacause we saved someone's life...it's always nice when that happens. because when you're on trauma, that's really what you look forward to. damage control. who know why this person shoots that person, but, as the surgeon, you open them up, and you give them back their life.

if they make it, they re-live those moments in the trauma bay over and over. us cutting off their clothes, rushing them up to the elevator, blood hanging near both hips. they re-live those moments and are thankful for their lives.

yesterday a young man what shot 5 times, and we saved him.

last week i sent home a patient that i had been following from the time i started work...from the ICU to the floor down to the discharge summary, and then packing his diapered 19 year old bottom onto a transport stretcher. when i asked if he was happy to be getting out of the hospital he shook his head and said that he was nervous and didn't want to leave. he looked over at me and grabbed my hand with his mangled, deformed hands and said "you're the only thing that make this place o.k. for me, everyday." i almost lost it right there, but i held it together cause crying in that moment just wouldn't have been right. this is a guy who was in a motor cycle accident, who came into the hospital as a rock...GCS of 1-1-1, which is essentially brain dead. he almost died in the unit so many times. but he's one of the ICU miracles. and i will always remember him as the guy that made it out.

i made him promise to walk back into the hospital and see me when he is better...i know he will.