Being in a profession where life and death are the biggest questions regarding patient prognosis in the minds of family members has its self-reflective moments of existentialism and spirituality. My Sunday School teaching impressed upon me that be it arrogance or the natural course of knowing, the more man believed he knew, the further from God he would stray. The natural curiosity of man fills the unknown with an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent being to satisfy the equation of the incomprehensible and organize the chaos of the universe in a black box known as deity. It doesn't change in the hospital, and seems more pronounced when the inexplicable tragedies of life meet good people. You ask around the emergency department, they'll tell you it's always the good ones that suffer, while the gang bangers and alcoholics escape bullets and 5 car pile ups with nothing more than flesh wounds and a government paid hospital bill.
Godot or no, sometimes it just doesn't make sense. I'm still scratching my head over a tiny baby girl that acutely decompensated in the emergency department. She was doing marginally, more fussy, sleepy, but moving around and crying appropriately. Next thing you know, she's seizing, being rushed to the OR to revise her VP shunt (ventriculoperitoneal shunt). Now she's comatose, not waking up, slowly deteriorating and no one knows why. Nothing kills me worse than seeing a grown man cry. But seeing a new father repeatedly kissing his daughter, asking her to wake up, telling his wife that he can taste the tears on her face... no one ever told us when we entered this life that some lots would involve becoming vessels of infinite tragedy.
The mysterious ways of God? Or maybe just the nonpartisan chaos of reality. Somewhere, far from here, a wealthy man just boarded his yacht off the Amalfi Coast in Italy to spend the day with his beautiful wife and children. Here at UCLA, we're discussing the withdrawal of care of a 3 month old that experienced little but surgeries and hospitalizations throughout her short tour on earth. There they are admiring religion as an aspect of history, canonized in the cathedrals of time. Here we are praying against all odds for a modern miracle, reaching for God now that death has bound our hands.
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2 comments:
if you can still write like this, then you're still human =)
wow. reading this was a sucker punch to the gut. i think as surgeons (and yes, i count!), we went into this field to DO something, to fix people. when we can't, the sense of powerlessness is daunting. we are not accustomed to giving up control to god/nature/fate. p.s. your writing is beautiful. keep it up.
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