chemotherapy/snowfall

Sometimes you get plenty of new consults, patients who are going to need chemotherapy.  There is the initial period of time where your patients are positive and energetic, or anxious and inquisitive but composed. You see them, talk with them, they appear to be doing well.

Then, in a day or two, you see all the patients around you become so tired, start to feel nauseous and ill from the chemotherapy, and start to sleep more, though uncomfortably and not with a good quality of rest.

You see white and red counts drop, you feel a little bit of anxiety about opportunistic infections.

You struggle trying to be positive and hide your sadness when you're talking to someone with metastases to their brain, sitting by people who desperately want them to get back to their old, vibrant and healthy self.

I wanted to write a meaningful entry but I'm short on time.  What this feels like is just a blanket of snow falling over a town, or thin, grey, wispy clouds muting the brightness of the sun.

This is a hard rotation for me.  Even harder for the patients.  It's hard spending all your waking moments thinking about medicine, the competition, how you're alone and hardly have time for anything else, how you thirst for those moments of happiness and satisfaction and fulfillment from things outside of medicine.

I work my sorrow and loneliness away for the most part, and there's seriously nothing else I would do in my life than medicine.