A Mile in Their Shoes
It felt odd being on the other side of this conversation. Normally I’m the one standing up, wearing the white coat, doing my best to convey the news. I’m used to seeing the anxious faces, the pacing and the mumbling, and all the other nervous tics of family members waiting to see how their loved one would fare. One would think that observing this behavior for twelve years would have prepared me to be on the other side, to be the one in the chair. One would be incorrect in that statement. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, and for some reason, the scrubs that always felt comfortable and confidence-boosting seemed tight and itchy like a straight jacket used to contain my anxious form. As my colleague strode through those glass doors, I noticed my knee bouncing furiously, and without my say-so. “ I need to calm down,” I whisper to myself. “I haven’t been this nervous since Residency, what's wrong with me?”.
At this point, I remembered one of the first patient-family meetings I dealt with. I was fresh out of Residency, twelve years of medical education, and yet somehow I was still so young and inexperienced. The deceased’s family was sitting in the waiting room, hoping to hear good news about their father. There was no good news to hear. Me being eccentric and egotistic, I was rather brisk when breaking the news. The man hadn't made it, plain and simple. They were heartbroken, of course, but I was ready for that. They spent a good fifteen or twenty minutes, just sitting there grieving. I went back to my office, I had left half of a sandwich I was looking forward to. All my professors had told me I would lose some, no surgeon had a one-hundred percent success rate. I had hardened myself to stone and told myself it was just part of the job. At the end of the day, I had somehow turned the practice of saving lives into some flippant statistic.
It’s so much different on the other side. I could only imagine what was going through my colleagues head at that point in time. Where I was used to being the flippant giver of life, not the small, helpless lamb that I felt like. Her life was in the balance. There was nothing after this in my mono-tracked mind, the only thing I was focused on was what the man in the white coat was going to say. He uttered one statement, that's all it took. I watched him turn away, and walk back through those big sliding glass doors. He was heading back to his office, probably looking forward to the half of a sandwich he had left there.