Finding primary care in the surgical ICU

[摘要] It was the start of my surgical clerkship, in my second year of medical school, in the middle of a 1-week stint on an elective rotation. I was sitting in the operating room, watching a screen projection of a robotic procedure. A loud beep went off and one of the surgeons, a resident,* pulled out her pager and looked intently downward. She, who had been watching the attending physician perform an especially difficult portion of the procedure, whispered something and stood up to leave. I followed.She maintained a striking intensity down the hall, up the stairs, around a few turns. We paced into the surgical intensive care unit (SICU) where, two rooms down, there had gathered a crowd of clinicians. We moved straight to the front, where the resident pulled a colleague aside and began asking questions. The patient was having a cardiac arrest and the medical team was working to keep them alive while another member of the team retrieved their loved one. But when the loved one arrived, the situation was discussed in tears and, shortly after, the code was stopped.ETCHED IN THE FABRIC OF THEIR LIFE AND STORY As I was walking back to the operating room, a surgical resident found me in the hallway and asked if I was alright. I responded that I was. But at the end of the day I left the hospital, went for a run, ate dinner, and could not fully shake the strangeness of how normal my life now continued to be, and how different the life of that loved one had forever become.Where was that person? They were almost certainly distraught and the long, complicated grief had probably not even begun to swell. Memories might have been flowing — happy memories, beautiful memories — all made to feel, at least for the moment, almost cruel. I might have been wrong, of course. These thoughts were purely hypothetical. I would probably never see this person again.

[学科分类] 卫生学