Code Blue

I work at a hospital, and today was uneventful. Patients came in, had their surgeries, and left. Nurses teased, doctors laughed, and every person on the third floor stopped by our clinical instructor's office for some Halloween candy. It was a normal day.

I left the hospital in a good mood. Brooke and I were planning to carve pumpkins in my backyard. As I pulled out of the parking garage and into daylight, I found myself at a stoplight. I glanced to the right, and there, sitting in the driver's seat of a dark blue minivan, sat an older woman, tears staining her face. She wiped at them gently, pulling her glasses away from her eyes to better clear the evidence.

I knew immediately that someone she loved had died.

Was it her son? Her husband?

It came to me then that I work in a place of death. While we, the healthcare providers, hold ourselves aloof from the tragedies our work inevitably brings - painful or terminal illnesses, stillborns, traumas - the families of those tragedies suffer around us. We can't be a part of it. We can't suffer with them.

But still, that old woman and her grief truly rattled me. I stared at her for as long as the red light would allow, until tears began to well in my own eyes. I had felt that woman's grief before. I didn't know if she had expected the death, if it had come swiftly or slowly, but I knew her pain.

Loss is something we try to ignore, but I think now, when a code blue is called, when the crash cart is summoned, when that steady beep from the LCD finally flatlines, I will remember that old woman, and the grief which our failure brought her. Being a doctor, I think, will never be easy, but knowing the depth of what rests in my hands will make it just a little easier to bear the burden.