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Recently in Salon Health & Body

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That time came while I was on overnight call for my sub-internship. One of my patients -- Mrs. Forman, an elderly woman with advanced stomach cancer -- passed away. The nurse who summoned me from my call room must have recognized the glazed look in my eyes as I approached, so she pulled me over to the side.

"You've never done this before." It was more a statement of fact than a question. "Just do everything I tell you," she whispered, pushing me into the dim, silent room. To say I was scared to death, under the circumstances, would not have been appropriate. I was frightened, but no longer alone. Like a little angel sitting on my shoulder, the nurse stayed by my side to whisper in my ear.

"Listen to the lungs," she said. My only experience with death until this point had been the anatomy lab cadavers that, after being soaked in formaldehyde for so long, hardly even looked like, let alone smelled like, humans. However, what I saw before me was simply a small, wizened old woman, with thinning white hair and veins bulging from her tiny frail hands. She smelled of old yarn. And while she didn't seem in perfect health, what she looked like most was a person with stomach cancer, only asleep.

The nurse pushed my stethoscope hand to Mrs. Forman's still chest, but I was unable to hear anything. Hmm. I'd run into this problem before on physical exams, and knew that with persistence, I would eventually find the sounds of her breath. I moved the stethoscope around, searching for a better spot, until my angel whispered again.

"You're not going to hear anything."

Oh, that's right, I thought. She's dead.

"Now shine your flashlight in her eyes." I did so, and after several moments the nurse bent over and lifted the lids, so I could actually evaluate the pupils I was pretending to evaluate. They looked right through me, as if calmly assessing something very far away, something the rest of us could not see.

"Feel for a carotid pulse." I put my fingers to the paper-thin skin of her neck and held them there, waiting for further instructions.

"Good. Now, nod to the family and say you're sorry." I did my best impersonation of all the warm, caring doctors I'd seen on television over the years. "Now tell me to follow you and leave the room." I did, and we were out. After I signed all the forms she told me to sign and wrote all the notes in the chart just as she instructed, my angel kindly pushed me off toward my call room and the awaiting bed. I was so disoriented, I didn't even remember to thank her. And as though it had been a dream, the next morning I didn't remember anything at all.

I searched in vain for that wonderful nurse as I scanned the 11th floor, but of course I was an intern now, 3,000 miles away from her and from medical school. Instead, I was met by a 24-year-old nurse who merely pointed at Room 1128 and went back to her bag of pretzels.

Unsure of everything except the fact that a dead person awaited me behind that door, I knocked softly and entered. Indeed, there lay on the bed a thin, balding, elderly man connected to about 40 tubes, plugs and IVs. Strangely, all the usual humming, sucking and beeping was missing; the room was eerily dark and still.

Next page | For the first time in my short-lived internship, I was freaking out