It's been awhile since my last post, since that time I've passed my test and now am considered a full doctor of medicine, though I felt that way for some time. I felt like my true test was in finishing my first month of the PICU. If you have a cold you go to an out patient clinic, if you have a illness that might kill you if untreated in days you would go to the floor of an inpatient hospital (the "wards"), if you are sick enough that you might die within the hour you will inevitably end up at an ICU...or in a coffin...in some sad cases both. During that month, I've had time to test my true metal and although I've passed through it's fires and I measure up to their standards I find myself lacking. Not in any one thing in particular, just in general, it's like my first day as a doctor, realizing how over your head you are...only its worse because this time you thought you actually knew something. Not to say that the month was a failure, I did well...I wanted to write about the first time I intubated a "crashing" kid while everyone was screaming and in chaos around me...I would have called that blog "clutch" because as soon as the tube was down the kids throat and they were bagging him life saving oxygen, I had this feeling of sinking a winning 3 just as the buzzer sounds in a basketball game (though I've never done the latter- in my head the crowd was going wild). There were moments like that punctuating the depressing drone of my conscience telling me that I don't know enough yet to soundly treat a truly critical child...I'll get there though.
I'm also going for a job interview in a few days...that's probably what has me writing right now, funny that an interview could make me more nervous than a child dying in front of me, before last month it would have been tough to say, but now its not.
I remember this little girl in the PICU that had a horrible cancer. We are so good at keeping humans "alive", she died (at least for me) the first week of our rotation, but our science kept her body pumping blood to the brain, kept the lungs oxygenating the muscles and the gut, which we fed with a tube in her stomach. All this time I watched God or Fate continue to hammer new nails in her coffin, so many unlucky events for her and every time a nail went in (one day she'd develop a pneumothorax, the next an fungal infection, and on and on) I had this nagging voice telling me that some force greater than us must want her dead because of how persistently unlucky she was. I never had to care for her myself, I'm glad...because I have a different word for the "care" that we do to the ones who have long since passed that we keep alive...I'll say it...torture, of the most sickening kind...the kind you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy...on Hitler or Satan himself. One day if humanity survives itself and can look back from a better place, we'll look down on the concentration camps and the Tuskegee experiment's and, yes, the "caring" we show to our loved ones in the same manner of trepidation. I'm not saying I'm in a "better place", I've just gotten to see enough of it, more than the most educated politician espousing how horrible it is to "euthanize" someone or one saying how righteous it is.
Here's what I want. If I'm on a ventilator or a heart machine for more than a week I want you to take me off of them and give me a nice long morphine induced nap, don't feel sorry for me, not one bit. There are far worse things than dying...I've seen them.
