An Exercise in Failure.

This is hard. I am tired. Did someone warn me that this would be hard? I’m sure they did.  Two months ago, I was the “glass half full” team member. I would say “Yay! no fevers!” and someone else on the team would say “But white count is climbing.” I would say “No signs of a leak!” and my team member would say “Not yet…. it’s only POD 1”. And I have found over the past two weeks that I have been moving that direction. I am starting to say and feel the “Not yet…..” in my heart. It has been a string of hard cases, a string of late days, a string of patients that continue to deteriorate no matter what we do or maybe we made a hard call and it didn’t go well. It’s hard not to feel the mounting of all of these negative outcomes. (Why is it so much easier to remember the bad cases?) And it’s harder when the “negative outcome” likely for me means that someone died or is going to die. How do I move past coding a 23 year old who had a tiny hole in his intestine but waited too long to come in and 3 days later he’s dead…to the next patient and not letting all your past experience taint how you are going to treat them. How do you continue to have hope when hope keeps burning you at every other turn?  And it’s so much harder to keep hoping than to just not hope at all. And how do I have any confidence in my decisions when things keep ending badly, wounds keep getting infected, people keep getting sicker?

So is this all an exercise in failure? I’m coming around to the understanding that it is not.

This probably requires a re-framing of success and failure. In the states, success was healing people, fixing problems, cutting the bad stuff out and getting people better. Here, I can do the surgery for the infection, but they have bad diabetes so they can’t heal the wound, so it gets infected again. And their diabetes is so bad because all they eat is rice, but they can only afford rice and their nutrition is terrible so they need to eat, but all they can afford is rice, which worsens their blood sugars and makes it impossible to heal a wound. So what do I do now. Well. What can I do? It may sound trite, but what I can offer is love. Compassion. A hand to hold. A person stepping in and saying “I care about you because there is a God who created you and you matter just as much as anyone else.” And I guess the question is…. is that enough? And I guess we will find out.

So where does that leave me. How do I make decisions when I feel like it wont even matter?

I will take heart knowing that God knows my trouble, but encourages me to continue taking heart anyways. 

And, I will borrow words from the wise Anna of Arendelle and just “do the next right thing”

This post is maybe sounding a little more dramatic than necessary. I am actually happy and doing well and happy as all of these photos will suggest. I just need a good sleep, a nice thanksgiving meal tomorrow, and to watch “The Holiday” on Friday to kick off my Christmas spirit. All will be well. 

What I’m Watching/Reading/Listening to

• Reading Out of the Silent Planet
• Watching Love is Blind. (listen… I know it’s trash, BUT I value honesty and vulnerability so I’m going to be honest and vulnerable… this is a safe space)
• Also watching: Lessons in Chemistry and College football
• Listening to Shania Twain’s album “Come on Over” as requested to be added to my OR playlist by my colleague Drew.