2007 Ending

So the year winds down its final hours, and I sit at my kitchen table with a book of Proust on my knee, a Diet Coke at my hand, listening to Michael Doucet's Cajun Christmas album. I couldn't imagine it much better, except for the cell phone nearby reminding me that I am on call. (If I weren't on call I can promise you that Diet Coke would have Jack Daniels in it.) Hopefully the ER won't interrupt me while I squeeze a few final words out.

It has been a year of many patients, and I would like to think I learned something from them. Some of my patients came to see me for trivial reasons, others for serious, and some brought with them true suffering. Suffering is one of those things that is irreducible in human experience. When we suffer, we can't explain it away, or ignore it, or pretend we are happy. Suffering often doesn't allow much else but itself.

It gives me sorrow to see people suffering, but also, I must confess, a certain measure of awe. For some people suffer with dignity, and look far more human in their pain than they ever did when they were well. I had a patient this year who was 98 years old, and when I asked her how she felt, she said, "How would" (wait, there's the ER again -- chest pain -- for me and the admission) "How would you feel if all your friends and relatives were dead?" She turned out to be a nice woman in the end, just someone ready for it all to be over.

As a doctor, I get to see a side of the suffering patient that even close family members rarely see. The courage, the hope, the effort. Sometimes the regret and the letting-go. It is always majestic, and shows how in suffering even the most insignificant people can burn with the brilliance of the Light in the East.

Hopefully I will see less suffering this year than next. But however much I see, I trust that in that suffering I will find not only the worst but also the very best.

And if, this coming year, it is my turn to suffer, I pray that my patients have taught me this lesson well.