one of the things i love about being in medicine is how it can always take you out of the bubble of your own life and make you truly appreciate life. every patient has a story to tell, and one of the best parts of my job is being allowed into a patient's life to find out their story. a person's state of health is so intimately wrapped in the details of their personal life that we as the healthcare provider can't help but be sucked into that world. some docs don't really like that and prefer to compartmentalize things and know the bare minimum to do their job, but i kind of like getting the whole story.

anyway, most of the time we kind of gloss over against the shit we see every day as somewhat of a defense mechanism, but sometimes there are just those moments where you still get hit by the gravity of a patient's condition. recently i had a patient, pretty young (as in his early 50s) who was in a coma after suffering cardiac arrest in the field. he was in the ICU and eventually going to be formally pronounced brain dead and put up for organ donation. so my team saw the patient and after we left the room to discuss his case, his wife came to visit. i watched her out of the corner of my eye as she walked in to the room. she gave her husband a small kiss on the forehead, quietly rearranged his blankets, and took a seat to watch over him. just seeing her little gestures of affection and knowing she would never be able to have her husband back, that even as he was in that room breathing with his heart still beating, he was already as good as gone forever from her....those are the hard parts of the day...but also the parts that remind me to be so thankful that i really only have stupid bratty first world problems to deal with.

on a day-to-day basis it's easy to get swept up in the chaos and drama of our own lives and even become overwhelmed by it sometimes, but i think as long as you maintain a healthy amount of perspective, you can always find something, someone to be joyful about in your life.