Thinking and feeling...

“The world is a tragedy to those who feel,

But a comedy to those who think.”

- Horace Walpole

The call came on her way home and she was drained.

“I’m not sure I want to do this any more. It was really hard last night.”

The comment was rhetorical…she needed to talk.

I had been working on a presentation about the importance of measurement in the clinical management of chronic back and neck pain. I’m getting toward the end of my speaking career and I wanted to ‘get it right.’ It’s a national meeting in Chicago attended by serious minded spine professionals.

My niece is a resident working nights as she rotates through the ICU.  These are the early days of her career, where everything comes at speed of the Niagara River…the precipice of its vertical drop over the falls to the chasm below so close you can feel its dangerous and unrelenting pull. 

ICU doctors live on the edge of the abyss paddling for all they are worth to keep from going over the edge, and yet in an ICU, there is an eerie calm that belies the unexpected patient crash, where suddenly, to the uninitiated, everything seems to descend into chaotic mayhem. To the knowledgeable, it is an orchestrated dance with life saving focus.

Figuring out which slides to use in a 12 minute lecture was stressful…hmmm – what to say? What to include? What to leave out? Would the sequence of thought make an impact on the attendees?

“I ‘pronounced’ an elderly man who had been operated on for a hip fracture,” she said.

“Two hours after the surgery, everything went south and he ended up in the ICU, where he died. It was heartbreaking.” 

“Pronounced” – the verbal ‘call’ for the official time of death.

Three years and eight months earlier as a medical student sitting quietly at the end of a dying woman’s bed, she quietly and unofficially ‘called’ the time of her mother’s last breath…IT WAS heartbreaking.

Man I’m telling you, getting the message just right for these 12 minutes I have been assigned seems to be a bit overwhelming.

The call was thoughtful...her voice and soul depleted…the night had been ‘nonstop intense.’  I could almost smell the antisepsis and hear the life saving monitoring equipment come through the phone.

I will be really glad when this talk is finished and presented a week from this coming Friday. It seems to take so much more out of me than it used to.

“I’m really glad the night is over,” she said, exhaustion seeping from her voice.

"I’m going to try and get some sleep.”

Then as always…

“Love you Teddy.”

“Love you too Mmer”

For some reason, that Chicago talk didn’t seem so important anymore….

- ted