Taking life as it comes

Two of my patients refocused my attention on living in the moment this week.  In a week when we were bombarded with information regarding planning next year and the next 4 years of our lives post medical school and into residency, I needed to be refocused on the here and now.

The day I turned 28 I had a conversation with an 82 yo patient my team was caring for;

“Ive been in the hospital a few weeks now. I have a problem in my lungs.” He told me how he used to smoke and drink back in the day, and now he’s just taking it as it comes.  “That’s all you can do”, he said.  He told me he’s 82 years old and has lived a good life.  Life is about giving and taking, he’s given all he has to give and now he’s just taking it as it comes.  Mr. B told me lots of people say you shouldn’t smoke or drink, but they die young sometimes too.  "You never know what’s going to happen, so you have to just take life as it comes."

Sand Dunes of Northern Michigan

The last day of my internal medicine rotation at this hospital I decided I'd spend my free afternoon sitting with a patient I had grown fond of;

Mr.N was severely demented, not oriented to person, time, or place, but every once in a while he had these breakthrough moments where I felt like we were connecting.  Each morning when I woke him up to accomplish my duties of finding out how he was feeling and completing a physical exam, he would pop his eyes open and smile "well hello there, good morning to you too!" Throughout the exam he'd  usually babble things I couldn't piece together- "how do you feel today sir?" "I feel wonderful, hot diggity dog- do you see that over there I'm going to get it!" Together we would laugh, maybe not about the same thing, but hey we were laughing!  Perhaps we couldn't cure his end stage lung cancer, and perhaps he didn't know what was going on, but he was happy and we could help him laugh.  This afternoon when I came in just to talk to him, I let him ramble about the most obscure topics and just put my hand on his as he laughed.  After a few moments he turned to me with a look of intention and started to cry. "I have been looking for the way all this time, and because of you I have found it."  Together we sat in silence for a few moments as he cried and I held his hand.  I'm not really sure what was going through his mind at that time, but I know that somehow an emotion was evoked merely by the presence and touch of another human being.

This week the NYTimes ran a piece on the effect of human touch and presence on the emotions of another human being.  Several studies have proven that mere touch and empathy can be as effective or even more so than the use of traditional pharmacological methods.