Vicarious wounds

Maybe no one had thought of it,” he said. “Or maybe they had, but didn’t want to say it. Whatever the reason, no one warned me about the pain medicine inflicts.” he reflected.

It had crept up on him over time, this sadness. The product of his compassion; this despondency oppressed his every day.

“I thought I’d save lives and help people; that I’d feel great about my work,” he lamented.

Instead, his patients’ sadness, their despair, their suffering and their remorse lived within him. Concentrated in his soul. Poisoned his spirit.

Empathy can be a double-edged sword.

“Talk to someone, they say …” he snickered with irony.

“Useless solution,” he answered himself with disdain.

“How can anyone understand what I feel?” he cried.

“Can you really describe to anyone the silence in the room, as a woman, exhausted, pushes to deliver what she knows is a dead baby? Or the sorrow in her eyes when she sees his macerated skin? How do I convey the apprehension I felt when I closed the door after I wheeled a toddler into a fridge for the night? Will anyone stay awake like I did, thinking of his mother imagining her baby; alone, cold and in the dark, without his blankie? How do you describe your shock, at the unnatural coldness of a body at autopsy? Can anyone even imagine trying to work, distracted by visions of your own child, cut from neck to pubis under the glare of police flashes? Can you imagine my unease, knowing that beneath that pretty dress, her organs are unceremoniously stuffed inside a garbage bag and hidden in her chest; sewn with cotton string? Can someone really feel the gruesome shock I felt when I took off the stiff collar on that little boy whose broken neck gave way under the weight of his head, spilling a mouthful of blood onto my shoes?”

Image courtesy of Fred Sebastian

So much resentment. So much grief. A litany of examples. I listened.

“That’s not what I signed up for,” he whispered, pressing his hands to his temples, as if to prevent his head from bursting.

“Can anyone understand the dryness of my mouth the first time I had to tell someone their husband had died? Can someone ever be as nauseous as I am every time I hear the music that played in that child’s room the evening he died? Can anybody understand what it means to be unable to erase the skeletal face of the boy I watched take two agonizing weeks to die after we stopped his fluids? And what would that mother say, serene in her gift of vision, if she saw how corneas are actually harvested? Shame on me for jumping on the learning experience!”

I didn’t tell him, but he was sharing. Finally, after years of amassing pain, he was sharing; paving the way to his own recovery.

Medicine provides a privileged glimpse into the most tragic hours of humanity. Quietly, stealthily, we accumulate hundreds of lives’ worth of sorrow into our own; seeing, hearing, smelling and feeling death like no other. Indeed, no one can understand or experience death like we do.

Perhaps, it is the pound of flesh we owe for the privilege of sharing a father’s joy as he cuts his newborn’s umbilical cord.

Perhaps it is the price of the tearful gratitude of the mother whose child you resuscitated.

Perhaps it is what we must bear in exchange for the satisfaction of having relieved an old man’s pain.

Vicariously, we suffer. But perhaps, just perhaps, it is what distinguishes the healers, from the doctors.