you have got to learn how to read the signs

Senior Resident.

Me.

ICU Senior Resident.

The nauseating thought that is my title. Are you sure about this? But i don't have the luxury to dwell on these fears. I know some things, enough to know that i don't know a lot. And that scares me. Scares me that literally, someone's life hangs by the shots i call. For every order i make, somebody's father, somebody's daughter, somebody's mother, a beloved person, is hanging. My only resort is to study more , to memorize more.

It is difficult to come in and out of the hospital and see how capitalism has taken advantage of the poor, of health care. How most is driven by money. To see disillusioned colleagues, to see colleagues hate their job and try to remain unpolluted. Innocent. It's so darn easy to raise a dropping blood pressure or to make dead hearts beat again, to make another person breathe again, but to save a life? That's another story.

There is nothing more sad than the sight of an amputated soul.

And i have seen a lot of them and it tears me that all i could offer is insulin for diabetes and to stop their tears and say, time's up. They say that it doesn't matter what you think or feel if you don't do it. Faith without works is dead.

And so in sweaty blue scrubs, i go everyday and talk to the undead. Are you okay? No reply. Are they still breathing? No pulse? Get me some epinephrine. I came such a long way here and i found a God given guide in the oddest of place. She was sitting there , amidst beeping ventilators, knitting away, her half alive husband in front of her.

So have you decided what you want to do when you grow up? She asked me.

She was a retired nurse and she likes to ask residents this question.

I look out the window and remembered Frankie my dog. Remembered my family back home. My sensei who got me into medicine, my charity patients back in the philippines. I remember their eyes. I remember lost souls, i remember grace and where i stood.

I look at her and say, yes. I would do hospitalist work and then part of my time for third world medical work, something that is related to spreading Big J's good news.

She smiled. She had been in the hospital for three months now because of her husband's sickness. She did not want to pull out the life support because she wasnt ready to let go.

I know of a place, a christian doctors practice several miles from here that does exactly that. They divide their income and any given time, one of the doctors go to mission trips, financed by those left behind in the US. Look it up. She gave me the name of the practice.

Two days later the wife decides to withdraw life support. After three months of holding on, she lets him go. She disappeared afterwards, but not before giving me that information. It was the exact piece of info i needed.

Some would say coincidence. I think it goes on a higher plane than that.