Metaphors & Medicine

On Palliative Care: Part 3 She had been at school, doing what she did every day. She probably said “see you later,” to her parents. Maybe she had plans with friends after school, a test to study for, another college application to submit. But instead of doing those things, she was struck by a vehicle that landed her on our floor looking very different from the girl whose smiles was now all over the walls of her room. I noticed her nails were painted a dark shade of blue, and I remember thinking how such a little simple thing reminds you of a life that each patient, each person, lives outside of these four walls. And then something happens, and they land here. They are here, and it’s up to us to keep their story as alive as possible, no matter how many machines they are hooked up to, no matter how many terrible imaging and lab results they receive. There’s a story in each room. After my first day in Palliative, I recall telling my mom how I felt as though my “emotions finally had a home...

On Palliative Care: Part 2 My attending tended to Mom, listened to her. It changed the meaning of “comforting someone.” Palliative is less doing and more being. He was present with her, and said less, did less. Stood, listened, tilted his head in a way to show her he was listening. She pulled her phone out and showed him a video of her daughter singing. She was beautiful, I thought. But then again, who wasn’t? . We walked into her room, and my eyes were drawn to the four walls around us. There was her story thrown all across the walls in the form of photos of her with her friends and family, cards with written notes inside of them, posters from the teams she was on. There was her story, and you could read it wall by wall. Finally, my eyes rested on the center of the room where she was lying very differently than in her photos or video. Up until this week, I had seen children with complex histories of chronic illness and developmental issues. They and their parents had accepted their l...

  On Palliative Care: Part 1 "There is less doing and more being,” my attending said. Each week in Palliative Care forces me out of what I think I understand, forces me to rethink what I thought I truly comprehended. It sinks in each time differently, deeper, at a level within my soul that leaves me with a feeling that is harder and harder to shake off. When I share that I am doing my clinical apprenticeship in Pediatric Palliative Care, I receive the same reaction: a shocked look, a sucked-in breath, or a hovering question: how is it?  I’ve been adding to this answer more and more as my time in it continues, and I met a patient yesterday that solidified how I feel about it now. While most hear palliative care and think of the word “dying,” I have learned very quickly in this speciality that death is not the worst thing that can happen to someone. I have been in a code before; I have quite literally watched air leave a person, leaving behind the home of the person that inhabit...

“Allah has called you into this. He’s facilitating for you to be in medicine,” my mentor said to me. I was sitting in my car, my mind exhausted from another long study day, listening to the rain dance atop my car. There are very little moments in medicine when we allow ourselves to take moments of silence, to interject the pattern of run, run, run to the next meeting, to the next lecture, to the next item on your to-do list. So while I was taking a moment to listen to the rain, to let it sing calming harmonies into my mind, my phone rang with my mentor's name on it. I just wanted to share the heaviness that medicine felt like these days, how hard it felt each day to just start, so much so that I've taken on a new routine that minimizes the chance for me to think about what I want to do and instead focus on the doing. "Years and years of this, and I'm still figuring out exactly how to do this because sometimes it gets hard," he said. I remember ...

  Dear Self, A year ago, you had hoped I would write, write, write my way through my life until I found myself. You had hoped I would find home, a home that wouldn’t leave me having to choose between here and there. You hoped I would find comfort in my “feel too much and all at once” self. I found that. All of that. I wrote about finding the stories on the walls and OR rooms in Nablus this summer, listening to the living stories through the streets of Ramallah, holding the little kiddo's hand as he woke up looking for his mother, listening to his mother tell me everything that the news did not tell me about the beauty, rather than destruction, of life in Gaza.   My “feel too much” self became my identity, shamelessly, my first and only skin. There was no replacement. I did not fight the stories anymore. My biggest fear has been to lose you. And I abandoned you believing that this was what I had to do to survive like everyone else around me. The truth i...