Maybe this time

I brushed his forehead. He was sweating. He looked at me. We made a hole in his neck to help him breathe. We hooked him to a dialysis machine since his kidneys failed already. His heart? He died for ten minutes and lived because we had the drugs to pull the silver cord and tell his spirit to come back again to his body. Are you in pain? I ask.

He looks at me and says no. I look at his drips. Fentanyl drip at fifty micrograms a minute, that should make anybody feel invincible. Good news sir. I tried to be cheery. I was fighting a losing battle here. His sister tells me that they want to withdraw care. It's not her decision, so we get my patient off sedation and ask him his wishes.

Part of me wanted to be heroic. I was a physician, darn it. I was here to cure. I was here to make people live.

Patient tells us that he wants care to be withdrawn. That even if he survives this insult, he could not live the life that would be set before him - bedridden, dialysis, ulcers... He died hours after everything was taken down. I wanted to run and cry at that point. Part of me felt like a failure, part of me was touched by the life he lived, part of me was still that little girl trying so hard to fix every thing wrong in the world around her. I choked back on my tears. In between sips of coffee, i kept telling myself that people die everyday in the hospital and it should not bother me. But it bothers me. A whole deal. It's not really that they die that bothers me, it's how little of life they lived that gets to me. Some of these people lived a life of hatred, of anger... they are separated from the people they should be bound to.

I walk down the hall and go to my secret place in the hospital. Where the mcdreamys couldn't see me. On the fourth floor of the hospital, there's this big atrium which no one frequents. It overlooks most of the area. I could see the snow, but its warm inside the building. The sun shines and i whisper my good bye to my patient's spirit as it departs from earth. Life is too short to waste on trivial things.

My beeper goes off.

Code zero at room XoxO.


Another person trying to cross the chiasm between this life and the afterlife. I tie my shoe laces, secure my stethoscope and run towards the code. Here goes another attempt to bargain with HAdes using epinephrine and electric shocks.