It was a long medical day. Just when you think you can’t get...
reminisce i don't know what i was going to say there. Something about getting hypnotized. But i wasn’t hypnotized. I was strategically recognizing the hypnosis as it was happening and thereby thwarting it.
It’s day 21, which means it’s the last day, and i’m pretty pleased about that. What a month. It went by fast and slow. Just enough time to get into this ‘i can't do this anymore’ mode with it. Yeah, it was really doable, very very doable, but shit, i don’t want to keep doing it. Happy to not have to do it any longer. Great job, --- ---. I’m proud of you for making it through. You thought on day two you’d have to call it quits, and then you made it out alive.
Today was the last day, and now it’s over, and now i’m happy, but don’t be fooled: i was pretty happy the whole time, except when i was desperately sad, sobbing in bathrooms and darkened on-call rooms. But even in those moments, there was a kind of delight in being able to appropriately grieve the losses that happen all day in that place—and i’m not just talking ostomy losses and emesis, people. I’m talking loss on a fundamental, human-life, spirituality, animal level. It is fucked up what they are doing to that goddamn tumor baby, bro. i can’t even bear to say his name because of how despicable it is, but it verges on the kind of thing that is so despicable that you want to say his name. I don’t know, man. It’s just really dark in there, and i’m sort of conflicted on whether to feel relieved that i don’t have to be responsible for those happenings anymore, or deeply ashamed that i allowed them to continue.
Realistically, of course, i know that trying to push the team to do anything differently with him would’ve rocked the boat too much. But then, you just wonder if perhaps you started planting seeds earlier, if... but no. i did what i could with the information i had at the time. I didn’t do anything that i wouldn’t have done, because i did what i did, and that is now my legacy. I closed with the suggestion to call a family meeting for this child because what the fuck is really going on. Guys, don’t forget about that, please.
I'm glad i said something. In the moment, you know when the moment is right to do something. The previous several weeks, i had thought about confessing my tumor-baby-concerns during rounds, but i did it in my own time.
When it came to time to say my piece, i was stopped by the slightest hesitation, long enough to lose the momentum of the conversation, which had been heading in the right direction. But the time was still right enough after the hestiation passed, so i brought it up when everyone was ready to be done talking about the baby. There's a little micro-lesson there: if i had grabbed the conversation by the horns and jumped in during that millisecond window when it was on the tip of my tongue rather than letting the silence get co-opted by the fuckass resident saying some
then maybe the response would have been a little hotter than tepid.
But tepid it was, and the tepidity made me feel small, and as though they don’t care about this baby. They weren’t getting the little messages, the subtle things that i was trying to get across, the least subtle of which being 'we should think about letting this life end as it desperately wants to. It's trying to end, and you’re preventing it from ending, and that’s not fair. You’re using tools that are so fucking unfair. It’s unfair to support this kind of life. It’s totally fucking unfaririrrrrrr. It's unfair to everyone involved, and those not involved. It’s unfair to his mom that she has to come in and hear what horrors they’re doing to her baby through the middle-man interpreter.....'
I wonder if the interpreter smooths things over that would not be so smooth if it were a one-on-one conversation. N----, for example, talks like a callous fucking scary person on the interpreter phone, and then the interpreter makes it sound so much nicer. How much work are these interpreters doing to ensure a nice experience.... They close each call with 'thank you for using our service.' That feels sinister to me. Maybe i'm looking too closely.
Come to think of it, it's extremely fucked to think that an interpreter could be an approrpaite replacement fora nuanced conversation with the doctor about what is happening and what you want to happen. That shit is so fucked, brother. We are already
gatekeeping certain important information from her when we explain to her what's going on, and then the interpereter's smoothing-over makes it all the more impossible for someone to say no to any of this shit.
That’s my synthesis of what makes this situation so fucked up. Or one of many syntheses that could be made. We could talk about the nurses who have taken care of him and just how fucking freaked out they were by the whole thing....
You can't take down master's house with his own tools, or from the inside. You need to go outside and get a wrecking ball or flint and steel or a series of well-placed bombs. You can be creative about how you take the house down, but you shouldn't default to the axe you see next to the fireplace, or the saw in the garage. You’re gonna have to get more clever than that, or you’re going to be
for hours at a time, making no progress as the days go by. But if you get your hands on a wrecking ball, you’re dealing with a different order of magnitude altogether.
I feel a sort of pulsing, biting feeling on my left side right now. Not sure if i should touch it. Let’s touch it. Just needed to give it some attention and then it's gone. That’s cool. Your body alerts you to ways in which you can help it keep going. Your life is one big among us game, and you’re doing your little tasks hoping someone won't dismemeber you.
Uhhhh, what do we even do now? Oh, that’s right. We have a new workday and workweek starting tomorrow, in a totally different setting. So here we go, i guess. But it’s with psych, so it’s with people who are gonna be attuned to whether or not i'm mentally ill. Please psychoanalayze me, babes. Please tell me i’m mentally ill and shouldn’t be doing this job. Please, i’m begging you to diagnose me with psychosis.
So yeah, uhhhhhhh, are we even bothering with unpacking the day anymore, or are we now just somewhere else entirely? I vote for somewhere else, frankly. I’m not interested in talking about the ins and outs of the medical world at this point, including the friends i talked to at the mandatory class meeting.
When our deans talk to us, they talk as if we have all applied to residency. Hello, what the fuck about me? Are they going to ignore me forever? They're allowing a giant to sleep, and the sleeping giant will awaken soon. He has fire in his eyes. I can see them now. Or is that just the reflection of the microwave light?
My eyes want to go to sleep, and maybe i should allow them to. My arm is starting to shut down, anyway, as if telling me to stop typing. Someone is trying to take control of my arm from within my body to tell me to stop, so i will listen.
I can already feel the arm quieting in response.
But now my arm is protesting even more. It’s the tendon or something, as if that dualistic way of doing science (arms and not-arms) even means anything to you anymore.
Honestly, it might just be time for bed. We had a good run today. Wrapped things up with the two beautiful babies i was following this month. Got out of there unscathed, now with more ammunition against this fucking farce that we call medicine.