What I Couldn’t Give

Time. That was the one thing I couldn’t give her. She was barely older than me, with a 1-year-old son and her husband at bedside, family members trickling in and out of the room. She looked different from how she looked when I first started taking care of her two weeks ago, more swollen, quieter. The tiny glint in her eye was gone as she realized she didn’t have enough of anything left, no life, no strength, no time.

Not enough time to see her son grow up, hear him perform at his first concert, give him advice about his first crush, scream from the bleachers as he walks across stage for his diploma, hug him goodbye as he moves into his dorm for college, or walk him down the aisle to his life partner. She wouldn’t have any of that. She couldn’t even stand, her legs so swollen from the cancer, making any movement painful.

Her one ask: to see her baby boy’s baptism before she was discharged on home hospice. She knew once she got home, the support she would need to be transported to make it to the church for a baptism wouldn’t be possible. She needed to make sure her son was watched over, by God, by the church community, and soon by her.

I’ve been asked what was my most meaningful moment from intern year, and always it comes back to this. Sprinkled amongst the horrid hours and lack of sleep were many victories: reviving patients, seeing clinical improvements with my proposed treatment plans, successful goals of care conversations to reduce the amount of harm done to the patients. But this was the moment for me, when I realized that the medical decisions were only a part of the power I could have.

From arguing with administration to allow us to transport the patient to our in-house chapel, to coordinating religious services with our palliative and spiritual care, to obtaining permissions for a priest from the patient’s religious community to officiate the baptism; I had never felt happier to argue and fight with the resistance I received than in that moment.

And there I stood, in the back of the Bellevue chapel, watching on as she sat in her wheelchair, eyes glistening as she witnessed her baby boy complete the sacrament of baptism. I couldn’t give her time, but I could give her this.

Written by Anonymous, Internal Medicine PGY-2