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.