‘Its 8:00 PM and I’m done’ said Dr. Joe. He was drained from a gruesome 12-hour shift. His scrubs had the signature stench of ‘Relief hospital ’ and his eyes like any other emergency physician reflected the urge to do nothing but get some sound sleep.
‘But she refuses to see anyone else but you doctor’ said the nurse in a tone that didn’t sound convincing to Joe at that moment because all he wanted to do was run away from his chaotic work environment which he had slowly started to dread to wake up to every morning. ‘What had happened?’ he thought to himself what happened to the young empathetic Joe who used to get a good rush of adrenaline from saving lives, from making patients smile and go back home, from lending some of his hope to the unfortunate. Before he could find an explanation to the downfall of his passion the nurse handed the file to him and walked away with an expression that wasn’t really motivating.
He walked towards the bed with his sore legs and with fear hoping that this wasn’t a patient who had to come back because he screwed up the last time he saw her. He had a glimpse of the brief notes the nurse had jotted down on the patient’s case file just to be alarmed.
Mrs. Alice.
55 Years.
Vitals- stable.
k/c/o bronchial asthma
Now c/o cough with expectoration since 3 days.
The memory of Mrs.Alice instantly came back to Joe who usually wasn’t all that good with recollecting the faces of his old patients once he drew the curtain and saw her face. He remembered how she had come with her worried husband about a month back during his night shift with an acute exacerbation of bronchial asthma severely breathless. He fortunately managed to treat her well and why this incident managed to stick to his memory was not because of the ailment she had but rather because this lovely old couple reminded him of his parents whose calls he had been avoiding off late because of his busy schedule.
‘Hello Mrs. Alice how are you doing today? Nice to see you again, I see the cough has come back’ said Joe with his tone transforming suddenly from a cranky sleepless doctor to that of a polite hotel receptionist.
‘Oh I have no cough doctor, I just came to see you’ she replied with a blank and subdued expression.
‘Then what’s wrong Mrs. Alice and where’s your husband today he seems to be missing?’ Joe asked
‘He’s no more Dr. Joe. He had a heart attack two days after we consulted you for my asthma attack’
Joe thought he had reached the point in his career were the news of death would not startle him that much but this was beyond the level of acceptance and made him gasp in the inside.
‘I’m so sorry Mrs. Alice’ and he could say no further for he didn’t know what to say.
‘Don’t be. The day we came to consult you after we left back home I remember how Fred and I discussed how you were such a fine young man and he was telling me how you reminded us of our son who doesn’t stay with us anymore. Its hard for me to deal with his loss alone but I woke up today and got reminded of you and thought ill come see you and give you this, a little something that I made’
She handed him a small box of cookies with a smile and suddenly the 12 hours did not seem that long anymore.
(As doctors we are trained to put our life and interests behind us and work for long and tiresome hours, which often distances us from the passion that this profession demands us of. Many a times we are weighed down by the extreme expectations patients have out of us- we are either seen as Gods with magical healing powers or ignorant money making machines there’s hardly ever something intermediate. The above story is purely fictional but its a reminder that however hard it maybe to retain the empathy you feel for your patients, and irrespective of whether you have reached the pinnacle of your career or even if you still haven’t found a place in this competitive field the challenge really is to seek and look out for the compassion around you and embrace it for that will never perish.)
