Sparkle in the dust

Last year was my worst year so far, in terms of mental state. I was depressed most of the time. I was not interested in anything at all, not interested in any clinical presentation or rare diagnosis that will make my peers jump in excitement although not literally. I dreaded going to hospital, walking under the sun, climbing up the smelly staircase to my ward, being part of the crowded and forever busy ward. I didn’t remember learning anything actively. Anything retained in my brain from Year 3, was there by means of natural osmosis, not by my hard work. I had mind block halfway clerking patients. I had to force a smile while thinking back the last question I asked my patients, and the next. My mind was a chaos. I felt like escaping every stressful bedside. Negative emotions accumulated inside me, I let them out by crumpling the medical notes I was holding. Squeezed them until I felt the hardness of each angle of the crumpled paper. I still attended most of the classes, even though without the ability to concentrate.

In my room, when I cried I can’t stop. I cried until my eyes were swollen and my double eyelids were gone as a result. I cried I had to breathe through my mouth.

Then there was this patient I randomly clerked. His AML was not officially diagnosed yet when I met him. He was still well, he still can talk when I first clerked him. Then his condition deteriorated and could not speak in full sentences anymore. The second time he was admitted, he had an arm abscess at IV branula site, an infection as a result of chemotherapy. He was the only patient I remembered clearly from last year. He was nice and was willing to talk to me even when he was very ill. I remembered it was a hot afternoon. I went to medical ward to check up on him. My every movement felt reluctant and heavy. When I was in the hospital lift, I put my hands in my lab coat and looked at the floor. I pressed the lift open for another person to enter, didn’t look up nor reply anything when he said thank you. I felt like a non-human, walking in an alien environment that doesn’t belong to me. That was until I saw the patient in the ward. He was lying on the bed, worse than how he was the day before. I smiled to him. Just like that, he made me smile from the bottom of my heart, when I didn’t even want to make eye contact with anyone. It was like a sparkle in the dust, a sprouting flower in the desert, a tiny drop of rain in drought.  

But I was not sure how he was coping with chemotherapy, or more blatantly, if he is still alive now. He was 78 last year.