need/want pt. 2

I have, however, learned the price of a life. I see these patients come into my clinic and assess them, spry old things with lots of stories and quips. I work with them for days, improving their strength, getting them on the recumbent bike, clapping on their backs to improve secretion removal. I listen to their life's tale, then I listen to their lungs, then I listen to their hearts dying, gurgling.

I come to work the next morning and he's in the hospital, she's in the hospital. Cachexia, congestive heart failure, stroke. Then they get discharged from the program; they are never coming back. They go from two years ago running marathons to multi-system atrophy and 2-wheeled walkers to the hospital for 4-person assist. I see them at their homes holding their puppy, showing me their room and the pictures of them when they were young.

If the death of one or two affects me so. I begin to see life as it is, to be happy and grateful and to thank God that every day we are alive is a blessing. I look at my parents and know that they too are getting old and I thank Heavens that we can still go to dim sum together.

I cannot help but wonder that if my heart cries out for one or two, then what about the parts of the world where hundreds, thousands dying means nothing to us over here. If we could stop the death of one, we save at least the grief of having one more dead. Nobody should ever have to experience sorrow and anguish.

I often contemplate the answer to this question, and often have many an answer. But I think the meaning of life is to preserve it and to do as much as you can to save life.

4 days

I had this dream last, last night that was slightly unnerving. I was in our angiography unit in Rm. 3 which is the room we do cerebrals in. I had just woken up from the procedure and was sitting in the bed and Dr. Ashforth comes out from behind the lead wall and tells me that there was a gigantic aneurysm in my brain and there is no way he can do a coiling or any type of surgical intervention. He then drops the bomb - in less than 4 days I will die, but the problem is that he has no idea when exactly it will happen and that I should probably avoid doing anything strenuous or sudden so avoid making it explode.

I just remember the whole entire dream being really sad and thinking about things we normally don't think about. Looking at it simply, my first Ur defense is shattered since I no longer denied the inevitability of death. I remember contemplating whether or not it would be fair to propose and get married to Mag because I'd be dead in a few days, or whether I should just let her go on and possibly find someone else in the future. I thought about making a will, but I don't have much stuff so it'd all probably go to Mag. I thought about how sad it was that I worked all summer and that I spent so much time working on physio applications and all of it being very meaningless.

I remember this one moment where we ended up eating at pho with me, Mag, Ellis and Will, and Mag and I just started crying together while Ellis and Will kept eating their pho none the wiser. Then Mag reminded me I probably shouldn't have any excessive emotions in case that might kill me and that dissolved the moment. The part that scared me the most was that the whole dream radiated with an air of tension, a constant niggling worry I couldn't avoid. I felt like I was constantly writing a final exam for four days straight.

I have to say waking up to darkness and the knowledge that I was not going to die in four days (actually, who really knows?) was very well received by me. I've never been happier to see 3:46 AM on my alarm clock.

death

I know it's not a weekday, but my posting has become sporadic as of late so I'll update whenever the inspiration comes around. I was hanging around Angiography on Friday thinking about making tea. We usually make tea around 2 PM, just to have something to keep us going throughout the rest of the workday. You'd think one of our English radiologists would have started the trend, but it was just some overeager nurse who had some time on her hands who started what has become tradition on 2A3.

Around this time, radiologists in Room 2 were working on a lady whom I will refer to as P. She had stenosis of one of her left leg arteries, so they were putting in a Maverick stent. The procedure was a bit of a complicated one because the narrowing was in a bent point of the artery, so they took good time working on it. Everything went swimmingly, and the nurses came in to do their post-workup assessments.

You see, everyone was focusing so much on her left leg that nobody had checked out her right leg during this time. One nurse peeled back a blanket from her right leg and found this MASSIVE hematoma, just this gigantic, bruising mass that left her thigh area so distended that it was about the size of two fists balled up put side by side. The doctors estimated that there was about 2-3 units of blood that had been leaking from an artery in her right leg, but nobody had noticed it because the focus had been on her left leg's stenosed artery.

P.'s blood pressure kept dropping as she was loosing blood, and got to such a dangerous state that we called the MET (Medical Emergency Team) - the team you call when your patient is crashing or about to crash. Immediately, everyone comes running into our unit, and Room 2 is flooded with doctors, nurses, UNEs, techs - Brock Lesnar could probably walk in dressed in a monkey suit and not look out of place in this mish-mash crowd of individuals. They all work on stabilizing P. when Lisa asks me and Tyler whether either of us knows where the blood bank is. I've sent some samples up to that area for blood typing before so I'm sent running upstairs with a req for two units of O neg.

I've got to say that since coming into a health care scenario, I have never experienced anything so acute. Jay predicted P. wouldn't last through the night, so running up two flights of stairs to beg for two bags of blood post haste felt kind of surreal. Running back the way I came holding two pouches of lifeblood felt like I was part of the team effort, even though I was simply the messenger. I arrived with the blood and they hooked it up and squished them in and I went on my way - 3:30 and end of the day.

I guess what I drew from this experience was that I'm glad I'm going in to a health care profession - I can see myself nowhere else. Rehabilitation isn't saving lives, but I just know that I am happy being in a place where I can increase someone's livelihood and well being.

burial

The year I was 17, my dad and I were driving home from Devon and I noticed a rabbit had been struck by a car and was lying across those yellow lines dividing the street as roadkill. I thought it was really gross because there was a clear tire tread mark straight through the rabbit's back, as if this was articulated vehicular manslaughter, er, rabbitslaughter. I looked back through the car's sideview mirror watching the dead rabbit get smaller, taking in the fact that pursuing cars simply swerved awkwardly to avoid it.

About a week bore on slowly - days tend to linger when you're working outside in burning sun scraping beautiful oil from tailings samples in order to find out the percentage of raw oil you've been able to extract. Every evening after the work bell sounded, I'd hang up my orange hard hat, dump my dirty work clothes into my locker, and board my dad's minivan for the ride home. Every evening for a week we'd pass that road on the way back from Devon, swerving to avoid that dead rabbit.

I thought the city usually appointed someone to clean up these messes, like animal control or one of its similar factions. I guess it was just too far out of the way for City of Edmonton to clean up, and just far enough for the County of Devon not to care. So lay this bunny in no man's land, baking out in the hot sun. The sight was ghastly.

One day when I was at work with nothing particularly interesting to do, I thought about that rabbit. I was hit with the sudden epiphany that nobody was going to do anything about him, and that if I wanted something done, I should do it myself. I grabbed a plastic bag that I had used to wrap up my lunch container, and a set of purple nitrile gloves we used at work. I put these in my back jeans pocket for use later in the day.

The work bell sounded, I hung up my orange hard hat, threw my work clothes in my locker, and hopped on my dad's minivan. The air was thick in the way that summer heat makes the air dry and stifling. We drove upon the road, my heart pounding at the task I would complete. We neared the rabbit and I told my dad to pull over; I was going to move that rabbit. My dad smirked but complied - whatever makes you happy, son.

I pulled on the gloves, then I got out. The air seemed a hundred times hotter without the van's air conditioning - it must have been 25 degrees out, easy. I took my time while cars passed, then the road was clear. I went over and took a look at the rabbit, and almost vomited. The guts had oozed out and dried against the pavement, and a large portion of its torso had been mutilated by birds or other scavenging creatures. It was infested with maggots and there were flies buzzing around. I plugged my nose because I knew the stench would make me gag, approached it, and using the plastic bag, I attempted to pick it up. The rabbit was too big to be bagged, so I thought I'd just move it. One of the flies landed on my arm, and in complete revulsion, I dropped the rabbit.

My dad laughed. I turned my head for a second and saw that he'd gotten out of the van to observe the proceedings. Having my dad there kind of gave me some courage - no son wants his dad to see he's weak - so I grabbed the damn thing, and being too disgusted to walk it over to the end of the curb, I chucked it into the ditch, bag and all. I carefully removed my gloves and threw those too, a pair of purple hands marking the grave of Peter Rabbit.

I was worried about myxamatosis and other rabbit-related diseases. I went home and thoroughlly washed my hands, then showered for half an hour. I've never felt both so dirty and so righteous at the same time.

Looking back on the incident, why did I psuedo bury this bunny? Was it out of respect? Was it simply because I didn't want to see people inconvenienced by it? Was I disgusted by the sight of a dead rabbit day after day with nobody doing anything about it?

Deep in my heart, maybe I just needed validation that by knowing what it means to be dead, I know what it means to be alive.