Death, Where is Your Sting?
Day after day I enter the rooms of men and women who have beating hearts and breathing lungs but are little more than warm corpses waiting for the end. Their faces lined with anguish, mouths agape in a silent cry, hands bound in a last resort to keep them from hurting themselves. These hands that were once warm and strong, eager to serve, work, create, and comfort are now only useful for drawing blood and measuring pulses. Their blank eyes are shuttered windows hiding a retreated soul. My job is to offer comfort to those whom comfort is a far-off memory, to apply feeble treatments for the onslaught of diseases ravaging their body, and to walk away from their rooms without becoming a shuttered house myself. I can hear in the lunchtime small talk that my colleagues share my struggle to remain soft-hearted yet competent, compassionate yet harshly realistic, a healthcare provider yet a fellow human being. As I listen ...