Contributing Writer
Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University
I am a Philadelphia native and a medical student at Thomas Jefferson University class of 2018. I have interests in health systems, policy and population health. Through my training, I have witnessed how we deliver care under our current medical system. I enjoy exploring ways in which we, as future doctors, can make positive change. In my free time I enjoy the outdoors, playing music and eating good food with friends.
He was sick, but it wasn’t like he was going to die anytime soon. A year ago, my dog Sierra sustained a neurological insult that left him delirious, unable to walk straight and almost entirely blind and deaf.
Never grow old she says, / As the IV beeps and her SCDs hum. / Enjoy your youth she says, / As her body creaks and her fingers drum.
“There must be a better way to make a living than this!” / Slam. / Silence, except for the persistent heartbeat. / The beat of the ticking time bomb, the dying heart.
Palliative. End of life. Dying. How do we care for patients at this stage of illness?
I’ve heard it said that knowledge is power, and that to be forewarned is to be forearmed. I still remember getting a text from my mother when I was on my OB/GYN rotation, during the first window of time I had gotten to use the bathroom all day. I remember her texting me a picture of a CT scan of my grandfather’s lungs with the words: “What does this mean?”
I spent the first week of my outpatient experience in internal medicine working with the nurses at Hospice of the Red River Valley in Fargo, ND. Besides being incredibly nervous to begin my third year of medical school, I was anxious about what I might encounter on my week at hospice.
In the playbook of professionalism, / Where is room for the physician who / Reads German poetry to the dying patient / For days and days until her end?
My alarm went off at 4 a.m. in the morning. I begrudgingly pulled myself out of bed, threw on some scrubs, and headed to the hospital. Not a car was on the road. It was the third week of my OB/GYN rotation, and I was on the infamous gynecologic oncology service.
I awoke to a phone ringing frantically, must have been a Whatsapp call. My father yelling from downstairs, “He passed.” And my mother, opening my bedroom door before my eyes had fully opened, stood there with her cellphone out, lips quivering, and eyes searching, “He’s gone.” My grandfather had passed away.
I found such peace in our stillness. / Your stomach rumblings almost music. / I caught myself peeking ever so often, / to find solace in your breathing.
He is not the first person to tell me that he’d rather be dead than alive. He is the first person to do so, so publicly. We sit side-by-side in orange, plastic chairs in a recessed, rectangular room awkwardly crammed in the middle of the unit. There is a nurse behind me taking the blood pressure of another man while he climbs stairs, part of the rehabilitation process for individuals receiving Ventricular Assist Devices in this hospital. Next to the nurses’ station stands a physical therapist, whom I’ve been tailing after like a cheerful retriever as part of our medical school’s homogenized introduction to hospital care.
In my third year of medical school, I was taking care of an elderly patient who had been in and out of the hospital multiple times in one month. Upon his third admission, my exasperated attending threw up his hands and said, “Who am I, Sisyphus?” I understood how he felt. Like the mythological Greek king rolling his boulder up the hill — only to have it roll back down again, ad infinitum — no matter what we did to manage this patient, he always returned to the hospital sicker than before.
Contributing Writer Emeritus
University of Pennsylvania
Matt Trifan is a current resident of emergency medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. He was a former medical student at the University of Pennsylvania. In his free time, he reads, writes, travels, and never misses a chance for brunch. He owes his life philosophy to Albert Camus and Adventure Time, equally.
