Most of you know I volunteer in a hospital as a medical assistant. I mostly handle the grunt work, getting supplies for doctors, organizing charts, spending time with the kids in the hospital. A clinical attending lets me tag along with him as he makes his rounds and visits his patients, his name is Dr. Michael Wei. Dr. Wei is the guy who treated me two and a half years ago when I was admitted for weeks at a time at the hospital.
About a week ago, I met one of his recovering patients, she had just been transferred out of the ICU, she was recovering from a heart attack. She told me she was thirty-five. I was shocked..she wasn't by any means obese or overweight, nor did she look like she had any unhealthy eating habits. Apparently her heart attack was due to a combination of stress, exhaustion, and sleep deprivation, and yes she had been eating some high cholesterol foods. That meeting could not have lasted more than 20 minutes, and when the time came, I left and basically forgot about her.
Today, she went into heart failure, and soon after died in that same room...it's the first time i've seen a human dead body.
I must confess, i don't know how to feel...I don't think i'm depressed, but i can't stop seeing that image in my head over and over again..hopefully by writing all this down i can come up with some way to react...I watched a scrubs episode recently where Dr. Cox said that he made jokes and was insensitive about death so that he could distance himself so that his job was easier, but i should have known not to listen to a tv show to have some sort of idea how real life doctors worked. Her death hit the entire wing of the hospital very hard, Dr. Wei was filled with grief, every nurse had tears in their eyes...
Although i'm fairly sure i'm going to have nightmares about today for a long time, the one small silver lining out of this whole situation is that it has not turned me away from wanting to be a doctor. This just will be the hardest part..
Thursday, September 18, 2008
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2 comments:
You're a strong person. I know you'll be able to do what you need to do. If it helps at all, you're working to make sure situations like that don't happen. Just don't force yourself to feel anything. The rest I know you'll figure out.
Good luck bud.
I used to work into a veterinarian hospital in Los Gatos. I had wanted to be a vet since I was in fifth grade, and after volunteering and working there for five years, I knew I couldn't do it because that feeling of watching them put the dead kitten that had just been alive five minutes earlier and batting my fingers with its paw was too strong for me to think straight.
I'm glad there are people like you who know that it's the hardest part but do it anyway. We need more of those out there.
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