A light knock at your hospital room door and my introduction: “I am a first year MD-PhD student. Thank you.”
You smile and wave me in. Hidden around the corner, your guest stands up from their bedside chair to leave your hospital room, though I ask if you would like them to stay. Their face, their eyes, and their mouth shine a striking gratefulness in my direction: as if, through the ever-present weight of my training and insecurities, I am someone, somehow standing in your room to offer anything of substance. I lean into their eyes and smile, which facilitates my entrance further into your room. They offer to take a walk and you wave them off. I won’t see your guest again, and I sense the loss of their warmth. I ask myself: What have I taken away from you? From them?
Across from your bed is an unoccupied chair that you prefer I sit in. This seating arrangement allows you to position yourself in a way that reduces the pain of your cancer. Metastatic. Of course, I oblige — and my line of sight to you is now obscured by the stack of spiritual texts on your bedside table. The hospital room is layered in drops of Bronx sunlight streaming through your window. We are both silent, and the only indication my preceptor has now left us is the absence of their once hanging shadow on the floor. We are alone, together. I am focused on you. You are young, only slightly older than I am. Your eyes and your shoulders squared above your postured back are open, both radiating a confident strength as you lean in towards me. I push myself back into my bedside chair while crossing my legs and resting my pen and notepad on top of my lap. This is a postured ritual, a personal anchor I have learned to drop with every visit, an imaginary shield raised against the incoming waves of human attachment. So we both are fighting. Before, and still today, you have survived. Fighting through nystagmus, your eyes seek mine out over the Christian texts. They don’t ever seem to leave me.
Now, you are concerned. For two weeks you have been filled with a sensation of new onset pins and needles, progressive and worsening to amount to widespread numbness. You can’t sleep, and you are now struggling with nocturnal enuresis. When you wake up in the middle of the night, you are confused and wet. I am a novice at scribbling while listening, and I try my best to reconcile the stream of your detailed story. Glancing at my notes, I sink into a fractal that twists deeply around your experiences and the corresponding timeframes. What is the culprit: your current treatment? Some insidious spread of disease to your spine? And when did it start? And how often does it occur? And is there anything you do that makes your symptoms better? Worse? And… and… and… the answer is no. Nothing makes it better, though time has made it worse. You continue to look at me with a face that meets your loss of function with a rational strength: this is the situation you have been given, and your eyes and mouth signal that you will see that situation to its end. It’s not that you are admitting defeat. It’s that you are acknowledging your being swept up in a process that often eventually ends with a different type of loss: the loss of time.
Time: I check my watch. I want to know you. But I have to return. To my preceptor. To my studies. To my family. And my life. So I cross my legs tighter and push my body further into the chair. With whatever time you and I have left, I have ensured that this educational distance is the closest we will ever come to each other. A flash of imagination strikes me: I am a physician, though I realize that this envisioned life is many years in the future. A subsequent wave of hidden emotion rises in my chest and I wonder, if I ever cross that stage: where might you be?
Image credit: courtesy of the author Roberto Ortega.
MD-PhD student at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Non-traditional student: older and a father. Roberto is a 2nd year MD-PhD student at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, NY class of 2031. He graduated from the University of Texas at El Paso with a Bachelor of Science degree in psychology (2008) and a Masters of Science in Mathematical Statistics (2011). He enjoys spending time with his wife and kids in his free time. After graduating medical school, Roberto wants to pursue a career in neurology, psychiatry, or neuropathology.