Dissecting Grief

My rotation through Internal Medicine started off with a month-long stint in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). Names were often misleading in the hospital regarding what types of patients you were going to encounter; I would see patients strolling into the Emergency Room for the common cold and another patient with trauma and major parts of his hand missing to the “low-key” walk-in outpatient clinic. However, the ICU was perhaps the most aptly titled unit I had rotated through, and the experience was intense in more ways than one. Where I was often used to seeing ten different patients with one acute problem elsewhere, I now saw one patient with ten chronic problems here. Looking back now, the entire month was one big blur where days bled into one another, quick rounds turned into endurance-testing marathons, and one dysfunctional organ system precipitated the downfall of another, like dominoes.

The ICU renders itself as a gateway for the acutely and chronically weak, patient’s whose lives are literally placed in the mercy of a higher power: what that power is depends on who you ask. I would be lying however, if I didn’t admit that the ICU has a distinct aura of holiness. Family members often tiptoe and whisper in profound deference to the medical team and to the patients as if the patency of the patients’ airways depends directly on their ability to minimize all sound. All who enter seek antidotes for their crisis, a distress composed of both physical and emotional elements and sometimes, the emotional masquerading as physical. Replace the pews with endless stretchers, the stronghold confessional with a curtain-veiled bed, and a priest cloaked in black bearing a cross with a physician shrouded in white bearing a stethoscope. Trade religious fervor for actual fevers, church bells for code calls. Some find God in a stained glass, we see god in a CBC. What we lack in offering salvation and moral and spiritual guidance, we make reparations for by providing physical and mental relief often in the form of pharmacological deliverance.

However, just as prayers are often not enough, so are the limitations of science. What do you do when your knowledge is failing, your faith wavering? When you’re forced to make a home out of a barricade?

A Little Stronger and a Little Saner

The day we all saw New York city’s skyline become permanently scarred, we too became scarred with a moment we knew would live on far longer than the minutes it took to vanquish those towers of steel. It was a new generation’s “Pearl Harbor.” A month prior to the terrorist attack, my family had a taken a road trip to New York City. On the itinerary was visiting the observation deck on top of the World Trade Centers. We ate at a Sbarro’s on the top floor as we enjoyed the magnificent view of the concrete jungle known as Manhattan. When the planes hit a month later, and I sat in my freshman high school cultural anthropology class, all I kept thinking about was those employees that might be up there (even though it was highly unlikely Sbarro’s would even be open at 9am in the morning).