Human Highlights

Stories from the Earth. Human Highlights : 12/22/09


I met with a family and explained that maybe I could help them decide whether to take their beloved mother off a ventilator and to stop prolonging her suffering. I planned to meet all 10 of her children tomorrow to assist with this difficult situation. Then I ran upstairs to the birthday party for my patient who died yesterday morning. His friend had decided to continue the party even though he was gone. She came and left food and a birthday cake with a single candle taped to the box. We looked at it. No one wanted to be the one to blow it out. On my way home I got off the train on Roosevelt Island to visit Coler-Goldwater to see my old drinking buddy(he’s 45) who has ended up with oral cancer, a tracheostomy and in a diaper. I asked him what type of cancer he has. He wrote “a medium sort…but bad on my tongue…I’m too weak to do chemo.” I gave him his Christmas present, a pair of cashmere socks. Why not cashmere when you are sick? Then I re-boarded the train home. As I walked through the post-blizzard New York City streets I looked to my right to see a crosstown bus pulled in to the stop. A young blind man had walked toward the bus and directly into a huge bank of snow. He kept walking unsteadily through it even as his stick could make no sense of the substance and then he hit the mailbox buried in the snow and kept ploughing into disaster. I was scared he would fall under the side of the bus. I stopped to see if I could assist. Someone else had run to help him. I waited a while to make sure he was OK.
We are human. Things happen. And this is what we do.