----

“As medical students, we are confronted by death, suffering, and the work entailed in patient care. While being simultaneously shielded from the real brunt of responsibility, though we could spot its specter.”

“ All at once, it dawned on her and she began to cry: wherever this ‘Practice EKG’ had came from, the patient had not survived. The squiggly lines on that page were more than just lines; they were ventricular fibrillation deteriorating into asystole, and they could bring you to tears.”

The first urinary catheterization I witnessed in my life, was performed on a patient who is now dead. He died in the afternoon, in the crowded stuffy medical ward with regular beeping from ECG machine. He has died before I cared to look at his face properly, to know his name. I eagerly observed the procedure, performed by a houseman assisted by another houseman, without knowing the patient's story. And he died.

Being surrounded by life and death, having to witness all kind of difficult lives, I have learned to blind my emotions. Until I forgot, an ECG of asystole doesn't just mean asystole. It means someone has died. We are learning through people who are dying, or who have died.