sometimes so many things happen in a day that you sit down at the end of it and try to go through all the events, all the people seen, and you think you do a good job, but you know, in the back of your mind, and you even bring it to the front of your mind, that it’s not enough, that no amount of contemplation will scratch the surface of all the impressions made.

and then you will have a dream, and it will force you to remember something that you hadn’t recalled in your contemplations, and you’ll be like, "okay, yeah, that really was something. that was something i wasn’t ready to let go. i just.... there was some reason for not remembering it last night. there was some reason... it wouldn’t have been... it wasn’t the right time."

but now, it’s the next day, and you’ve had the dream, and you woke up, and it feels, just.......

i’ll insert what i wrote when i woke up.

The truth is I’m still quite mentally disturbed, and I don’t realize it until I have my dreams. And then I know for sure.

I was taking care of this baby. I heard that he had "triangle arm syndrome" or something. He was all bundled up on the countertop in my kitchen. I did not want to unwrap him just for the sake of looking at his arms, but at a certain point he unwrapped himself, flailed around a little, and I saw his right arm, akimbo and shrunken.

Someone came into the room, and there was a shift which caused me to notice that the baby was lying quite precariously on the counter, about to slide off it. I managed to catch the baby as he was falling, and that’s when I had the split-second thought: "Okay, phew, as much as the parents don't like me, they'll have to give me credit for saving their baby." While having that thought, I lost the flow state, having distracted myself with ego world, and I must have overcorrected, because I flung the baby to my left, across the countertop, and he fell straight on the floor, hitting his head, as if with a splat, and the right side of his head sunk in and deflated where it had hit the floor. Both parents in hysterics. I immediately felt the full weight of all the blame as I stood watching the baby, his head like flat tire, deflated just in that one place. I went over to the baby and held him in my arms, and I showed him all the love I could possibly muster. He said some things to me as he was dying, like "Life...." Some generalities about life and its beauty.... And I felt at one with him as he died.

The dream was certainly a direct result of looking at Redacted's chart yesterday and seeing that xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx... but then, sure enough, you look at the clinical image, and his xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, and his xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, in an almost comical way. The whole lower half of his xxxxxx is huge, having accommodated the fucking xxxxxxxx for that long. In his chart it says he can’t xxxxx his xxxxxxx.

And the dream was my catharsis, because he was finally allowed to die. The one thing that they physcially would not let that baby do, he finally did, and he did it under my watch, and I shared that moment with him as he finally did slip away and say those final words very quietly as the life left him.

I’m glad my dream instincts told me to go be with the dying baby, but when I think of xxxxx, it really does make me want to start crying right now. I feel a cry seize me, and it's just one, and I can’t cry. I’m not fully cyring, I.... It's just....

I was thinking as I went to sleep last night that medicine holds everyone so accountable that even if I wanted to take a stop at the nickyou and check on xxxxx... although I suppose he's in the pickyou now... I wouldn’t be able to xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx or anything because of all the alarms and all the people being paid to keep him alive no matter what. The inertia of the system is such that you cannot let someone die, really, without being criminally liable. You have to "do everything" in these cases, or at least that’s what the team kept deciding day in and day out when I was there... nobody ever wanted to switch up the course, and as much as I tried to influence things, nothing ever worked, nothing ever worked, I was so powerless to change anything about that situation, and now this baby is back on fentanyl and who knows what other drugs to prevent him from having pain, and he no longer has that xxxxxxxxx in his xxxxx, but at least for now, he’s going to have the ghost of it, still taking up all that space.

He was going through the earliest days of his own development. Shit was ossifying, bonsai tree getting trimmed in his brain, synaptic pruning was happening... and now look at him.... Now look at him. He's going to be xxxxxxxxxx, possibly for a very long time, unless they can figure out some kind of procedure to get him to xxxxxxxxxxxxx... bro... please, god, can you please have mercy on xxxxx? Can you please take him out of the care of the people who err? Can you please take him out of the hands of these people who know not what they do, and can you welcome him to whatever there is for people after they die? Can you please allow him to feel the sweet embrace of death? I pray that you will let him go. I pray, I pray that you will let him go. He has been through enough trials to last anyone a lifetime. I believe he has hit his maximum level of suffering... I believe it is time............ but I will not presume to know what is best in a situation like this. I just know that I was crying in my sleep, and no matter how much you talk about what happened, you are still going to need your dreams to process the rest of it.

I looked at those images for a good while. I had to do it.... He has grown since I saw him... he looks like a proper baby in some ways, but then the xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, there is nothing normal or proper about that.

And with that, it’s a very depressing start to the day, quite unexpectedly so.

these things follow you. you get followed by the things you see for longer than you can ever expect, i bet. i’m not sure how long it follows you, or if it stays forever, if you’ll always have that weak spot because of that baby you met six months ago. will i always have the weak spot for xxxx? even though the xxxxxxxxxxx?

the better question is whether xxxx will always have the weak spot, and the answer to that is yes. it’s obvious that it will always.... it will always... yeah.

i don’t know.... how to talk about some of these things. i feel like HIPAA makes it harder to fully process some of these things. i would like to describe in excruciating detail what xxxxxxxxx looked like, where it was, and what the baby looks like now that xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. i wish i could describe how xxxxxxx he is, how now the baby’s...... a blank space... a ghost.

the point is..... i don’t know how to talk about this.

i’m just done, i think. i’m ..... i had a good run this week. i had a good run of romanticizing medicine.... i’ve started letting go of the anger that defined the four years up till now, and now that the home stretch is happening, i find myself more at ease, and readier to be a comfortable and familiar and friendly presence in the hospital. i’m less on edge... less stressed out... i come home with less angst... and i almost start to consider whether i should actually continue on this path.

baby dreams and then i’ll have dreams about babies hitting their heads on the floor and slowly dying in my arms and talking to me about whatever there is for babies to talk about, and i’ll think about xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.

this is where it gets dangerous, and this is where i feel compelled to stop talking. it threatens to just..... it threatens too much. it threatens way too much.

the point is it’s hard to do medicine because you see manmade horrors beyond comprehension every single day, you see them every day, and you don’t really have time at the end of the day to fully process them, so then you process them through dreams, and then you wake up wanting to cry, and you do one little sob, but you don’t..... your body doesn’t let it turn into a thorough cry session.

and you’re not even on SSRIs or anything. the only thing blunting your emotions is straight up exhaustion. the only thing preventing you from crying is this presentation you have to do for the ultrasound conference today. you have to work on your slides. you have two hours left to prepare, and then you gotta head out of the library and into the hospital, and you gotta make sure the powerpoint is able to get sent to whatever screen you’ll be presenting from, and you gotta get the nerves out of the way, and you gotta familiarize yourself with all the literature that you’re citing, and you gotta..... eat lunch, maybe, yeah.... but whatever you do, .......... you don’t have all that much time.... or energy.... to think about the baby who xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx who no longer xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx but has made.... whose body has made so many changes... whose body has grown to accommodate the xxxxx... he can’t fucking xxxxxxxxxxxxx anymore... his xxxxx is not able to xxxxx, and his whole xxxxx is just like xxxxxxx,,, xxxxxxx... whatever the word is for when xxxxxxx is getting blocked or otherwise uhmmmmmmmmmm perverted by something getting in the way. i think it’s xxxxxxxx. shit, man, who gives a fuck about vocab. his xxxxxxxxx is just so xxxx now.... and i have no idea if he’s ever gonna be able to xxxxxxxxxxxxx. fuck, man. anyway, yeah. happy uhhhhh thursday.