the scale of suffering

for about a week now, i have been meaning to post on my blog - talk about the first week of classes, my roommates, the transition, etc. but i'm glad, in a sense, that i'm such a procrastinator because thursday was my first day of clinical rotation for the semester, and it was such an amazing experience.

on thursdays i am at a hospital here in boston on a medical intermediate care unit - we generally have strictly medical patients who present with end-stage heart disease, post-stroke, renal failure, or end-stage liver disease, waiting for a transplant. they are very, very sick people often on upwards of twenty-five different medications for all of the complications and complexities of their diseases.

my patient on thursday was one such patient. she is fifty-five years old and dying from lung cancer. she's been fighting the cancer for a few years now, but then a few weeks ago, everything was complicated by a massive stroke which left the left side of her body paralyzed. when i saw her, she was continuing to have many issues including a decreasing mental stability. she was seeing people in the corners of the room or standing above her chair - people who she hated or people that had hurt her or random strangers. it was relatively overwhelming, to be sure - especially because i haven't taken the psych nursing class (that's next fall), but i was definitely blessed to have the help of another girl in my clinical group.

i was just so struck by the fragility of our human lives. i saw her lying there, staring off into the corner, the left side of her body completely useless to her, and i imagined what she would have been like only a few weeks ago. she was young and vital, completely bowled over by a series of severe and crippling diseases. seeing her and caring for her didn't make me never want to get old or never want to be in the hospital - maybe that's still the adolescent sense of invincibility in me - but it did make me take a minute and fully appreciate what a blessing my mind and my daily functionality is. i did yoga on friday with my roommate, and i'm still incredibly stiff and sore, but at least i can still move, at least i can still determine reality from hallucination...

it was difficult, in a way, to be in the hospital state-side again - to see everything that is made available for these patients, and then to think back to my own experience or to read the blogs of my friends still in sierra leone and hear about the struggles with equipment and medication and even more fundamental things like electricity and water...but, in the end, i have to enter into the suffering of the person i am with. i couldn't deny that woman the support, respect, and love that she needed just because she happened to have access to top notch healthcare.

suffering and pain cannot be measured on some absolute scale...