Epidemic, War or Car Crash, the Dead are Mourned by Someone
When I was in college and decided I wanted to go to medical school, I kept a picture of a medical transport helicopter on my desk. It represented the excitement I wanted to experience one day. When I was in medical school, I loved nothing better than watching in the chaos of the trauma-bay, helping as the blood spurted to the ceiling from a gunshot wound, assisting the insertion of IV’s and chest tubes.
Later, in my emergency medicine residency, it was more of the same. I rode in that helicopter! I helped pick up the bleeding from the highway, where metal wrecks yielded wrecked bodies. I saw the charred skin, the holes in hearts, the dying strokes, the cardiac arrests. They were mine to care for, under the guidance of my teachers.
By then, I was beginning to grasp what was transpiring before me, as my doctor fantasies played out in the lives of real humans. I’ll never forget the sound of a mother screaming when she learned her teenage son had died of injuries sustained in a truck crash. It echoed out of the ICU room where he lay lifeless, still connected to tubes and lines. It vibrated down the hall and out into the waiting room. I couldn’t get away fast enough in my pointless, helpless white coat and scrubs.
I continued to love a good stabbing, a good poisoning, a good cardiac arrest (as if the word ‘good’ had anything do with it in the lexicon of regular, suffering humans). It was, and remains, my job to intervene when the worst things happen to the human body. Falls, crashes, fights, toxins, drownings, magnets stuck on the penis (well, he was pretty worried about it…).
However, around 1994, a year after I started my first job as a practicing physician, something happened that changed me. My wife gave me our first child, a son. And over the next few years, she gave me three more children; two more boys and a girl. And since then, suffering has taken on a totally different meaning for me. From then on, I saw in every injury, in every death, someone’s son, daughter, father or mother. Someone’s husband or wife.
I sat alone, one night, rocking my first-born when his mother was out of town. I wondered what would happen if I lost her. At work, I naturally listened to the dispatch radio. When an ambulance was dispatched to bad car crashes, I called and called until I heard her soothing voice. ‘We’re fine; it’s alright.’ And she did the same to me when I traveled, or came to and from work. My care-free bride having contracted the same anxiety as my own from living too long with a worrisome doctor; worry, a communicable disease in a dangerous world.
I’m 50 now. I have seen enough of suffering and loss. I’m not quitting, but if I never pronounced anyone dead again, it would be fine. If I never found another brain tumor, or told someone their loved one had passed from this life, I would be ecstatic.
And yet, even if I turned in my stethoscope and sat at home, these emotions would be impossible to avoid. My heart has been broken open, as have the hearts of so many who live and work with suffering. The news cycle is an endless liturgy of loss and pain.
These numbers speak to me: 200 killed by ISIL, one executed in Iran, 10,000 dead of Ebola, family of four lost when their boat capsized, clerk killed in a robbery, athlete paralyzed in game, soldier murdered by terrorist, woman found strangled in woods.
The statistics are perhaps more real because I’ve tried to stop the bleeding or restart the heart. I have given the news; I have walked into the room where families, with racing hearts, know that there’s only one thing I have come to say. I have seen them gather the belongings of the dead and take them home, numb.
And having stood eye to eye with the survivors, having heard their sobs, having watched them faint, I can only extrapolate to inner city America, West Africa, Ukraine, Syria, Iraq; any place where suffering seems incomprehensible due to scale.
But despite the scale of war or epidemic, numbers which we read over dinner in our safe homes, these events so distant from our own lives yield mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, wives and husbands who continue to weep and strain beneath the crushing loss of those who meant nothing less than the world.
Wars and diseases, intrigues and coups and all the rest are, indeed, interesting things. But more important, and more terrible, is the fact that grieving humanity suffers at the center of it all. Maybe that knowledge can make us love everyone better. Because friend or foe, across the street or half a world away, everyone cries when they bury their dead, and gathers up final belongings as tokens of loss.
Dr. Leap, as usual, this was so very true and so well written. You are an amazing writer as well as a wonderful Doctor. Thanks for the opportunity to read your heartfelt writing. And we still miss you and your family at CSBC in Walhalla SC.
Tammi Fugere
8 years ago
Dr. Leap
Thank you for your passion and your ability to put into words something unexpected, you woke me up!
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Dr. Leap, as usual, this was so very true and so well written. You are an amazing writer as well as a wonderful Doctor. Thanks for the opportunity to read your heartfelt writing. And we still miss you and your family at CSBC in Walhalla SC.
Dr. Leap
Thank you for your passion and your ability to put into words something unexpected, you woke me up!