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Metaphors and Medicine (Year II): Chapter 5

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 in medicine.”


Even now, as I grapple day in and day out with the battle of feeling too much to study and feeling too little when I’m drained that I don’t feel like myself, it is reassuring to head into a place where the stories each week remind me of our humanity. Medicine is largely a huge system of processes that we strive to understand better, knowing we will never truly understand it fully. But there’s the component of understanding a life that seems to be just as important, and what we learn in the classroom simply does not prepare us for it.

I sought this experience in Palliative Care because it terrifies me just as much as it inspires me. M1 year made me aware of how powerful my emotions can be; M2 year has become about embracing the parts that make me who I am and believing there is a place for each unique component that makes up our personhood. There is nothing in the world that can prepare us for having a conversation with a mother like this one about the options her daughter has left.


We can say a script, but when her heart breaks in front of us, and the memories of her and her daughter cascade like a waterfall, we must have the heart to simply be.

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