When Patients Become People...

Life becomes harder when patients become people.

When the 9 digits of the hospital ID becomes a name.

People who breathe with people who love them.

People with future plans and dream houses.

People with warm smiles and favorite ice cream flavors.

Then suddenly no decision is simple and everything becomes much harder.

It is easy to intubate 57 year old male with a perforated colon.

It gets harder when you know the 57 year old dad who promised his daughter that they will go to Manali next month.

It is easy to amputate the gangrenous left leg of 42 year old female with peripheral vascular disease.

It gets harder when you know the 42 year old woman who works every day in the scorching sun to save up money to send her daughter to college.

It is easy to say the baby didn't cry, it was only 30 weeks.

It gets harder when you know the middle class couple whose next few decades of life will go into taking care of a differently abled child.

It is easy to say patient was in severe sepsis, arrested and couldn't be revived.

It gets harder when you know their partner who spent years getting to know them, planning a future with them and pffft, their life together arrested.

It is easy to decide to make a hole in the 8 year old boy's throat, to help him breathe.

It gets harder when you know he dusts the little trophies he got at the school youth fest with much pride.

It is easy to enucleate the eye of a 2 year old girl, to free her from cancer,

It gets harder when you know little girl who will grow up and constantly ask herself, "Am I ugly?"

A myocardial infarction, seems manageable, until it happens to your father.

And then suddenly its fatality starts to scream at you.

A rectal bleed feels like just a symptom, until it happens to your mother.

Then it suddenly worries you even in your sleep.

And in some patients you see your father and your mother, and your soulmate and it suddenly becomes very real. The pain gets dangerously proximal. For a split second. Then you quickly pull your shield back up where people become patients.

Life becomes harder when patients become people.

When their stories become real

Their tears become tangible.

Life becomes harder when you process the cries in the corridor.

Your decisions have too much consequence,

And judgements get clouded when life gets harder,

So you tune out the cries and people become patients.

- Kavitha Girish on Instagram

https://www.instagram.com/p/CstKGimyg6d/

(https://www.instagram.com/kavithagirish/)