Does it even linger? Short Essay
Let's call her Mrs.X. She swallowed a can of toxin -- to kill herself. Arrived at my Emergency Shift, hanging by a thread of life. Whispers of family thingy going down, combined with a series of wrong choices, the light is losing its way.
Can I care less? May I? Does the burden get lighter as the day goes by? Sometimes I wish I did not care, so I can sleep well. Yet they live in whatever part of my body.
My patients never left me. The words of French surgeon René Leriche live true today.
We all carry cemeteries within ourselves. They are filled with the headstones of all the patients who have come to harm at our hands. We all have guilty secrets, and silence them with self-deception and exaggerated self-belief. *
I wish when I am older, later, I could understand what Henry Marsh said:
To dismiss the feeling of consciousness, superiority, transcendence, and see them as they are seen: bags of physical matter.
it was some time before I learnt that usually the families would take the patients home, hand-bagging them if necessary, so that they could die with some dignity within the family home, with their loved ones around them, rather than in the cruel impersonality of the hospital. It struck me as a very humane solution to the problem, although sadly unimaginable back home.
Does it even linger? Or will it be as painful and as intense, as it is today?