Just a Stranger on the Bus
Rays of
late-September sunlight flood the crowded Mount Pleasant Funeral Home as second-year Island Medical Program students read the final lines of a Johnny Hathcock
poem:
Weep not for me, though I be gone.
I shall not really die.
A diverse crowd fills the hall’s wooden benches: from the
wide-eyed baby sitting in his father’s lap to the elderly couple clutching
Kleenex in the front row, people of all ages have gathered for the UBC Faculty
of Medicine’s 2010 Donor Memorial Service.
I stand
against the wall in the overflow room to the side of the main hall, amongst a
crowd of fellow first-year medical students. Their neatly pressed suits and
respectful stance would not suggest the revelling of less than twelve hours
past at the first-year medicine toga party. As the first lines of the medical
students’ a cappella group’s Irish folksong ring out into the hall, I watch a
snowy-haired couple in the second row dab their eyes. A minute of silence is
observed to respect the cadaver donors.
After
twenty minutes the families shuffle slowly to the front of the hall to each
receive a potted chrysanthemum and card written by a second year medical
student. We watch from the overflow room, exchanging whispered thoughts on the
brief ceremony. I make small talk with a fellow classmate as I try to recall
his name from the 255 I have been attempting to learn over the past several
weeks. Sweat beads on his forehead in the warm and crowded room; everyone
complains of the heat.
We fall
silent and smile at a silver-haired lady who walks over to ask if we are “the
medical students”. Her voice breaks as she tells us that her father was a
doctor and that we have an amazing future ahead of us. She apologizes for being
emotional and thanks us profusely; we thank her in return.
As she walks away I cannot help
but wonder what she is thanking us for. Does she know that we have completed
exactly three weeks of medical school? That it was only two days ago that I
figured out which way my stethoscope earpieces should be facing when I put it on? Minutes later an elderly man tells me that his father
is one of the donors and jokes that his dad, who never had a post-secondary
education, saw donation as his chance to go to university. As was the lady who
thanked us earlier, this gentleman appears to be very pleased with us.
It feels undeserved to receive
such respect from strangers upon mere mention of our chosen profession. I can't help but feel overwhelmed
by the social responsibility already encroaching upon us. New experiences have
been coming at us quickly over the past few weeks, and we have a lot to learn
between now and the day when wearing our white coats and stethoscopes no longer
feels like a game of dress-up.
As we mingle in the crowded
reception room, balancing paper plates of fruit and Styrofoam cups of coffee, I
watch the family members, wondering who, if anyone, is here for the person we
currently have wrapped in white sheets in the sub-basement anatomy lab. We know
only that our cadaver is a 102-year-old female—the oldest donor this year. Any
children she may have had would now be elderly themselves.
As of three weeks ago I had never
seen a dead person or even attended a funeral. Then came the first day of
medical school, when I found myself making an incision into a dead lady’s back
with my classmates doing the same on the 52 other bodies around me. As we were
told on the first day of gross anatomy, it is not normal to be in a room with 53
dead people. It seems that to avoid being unnerved by this, it is easier to
regard the cadavers in the gross anatomy lab as bodies, rather than as people.
With the cadaver’s face covered and body shrouded with sheets, only exposing
the region currently being dissected, the uneasy student can detach the
technical work from the human being in an almost surreal setting. Some students
prefer it to be this way—when offered the opportunity to look at their
cadaver’s face they chose not to do so. During the third lab when some of our
group members decided that they were ready to see our cadaver’s face, I joined
them to look upon the face of the person from whom we had the privilege of
learning.
Indeed, it is a privilege to work
with cadavers. Yesterday, holding our cadaver’s heart in my hands, I examined
the valves and chordae tendineae—structures as perfect as those drawn in our Gray’s Anatomy textbook, even after 102
years of constant work. Being able to look at the inside of a person’s heart—an
organ that has been beating through every experience in their life—is a
remarkable feeling, and drew all of us closer to the lady behind the body on
our table.
And so, as I stand on the crowded
B-line bus headed back to UBC, I think about what I have had the privilege of
experiencing over the past few weeks and about the new weight of social
responsibility that accompanies. Though in gross anatomical terms I am in no
way distinguished from the old man in a paint-speckled jean jacket, the Chinese
lady knitting a scarf, or the skateboard-carrying teenager whose iPod I can
hear from two rows away, I realize that these people may be my future patients;
under the pretence of my profession I am no longer just the stranger standing
beside them on the bus, but a professional whom they can trust with their
problems, secrets, and perhaps even life. It is humbling to realize the
confidence that complete strangers have in me, as I begin my education in this
interesting field.
Just loved it! :)
ReplyDeleteThank you!
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