Friday, November 20, 2009

Mortality

KeepBreathing has a post up about how treating patients your own age can force you to confront your mortality.

Being one of the youngest working in the ER, most patients my age are lightweight college students puking in their stretchers. Recently, however, I took care of a woman only a year or two older than myself. Terminal Stage IV cancer. Beautiful, polite, and funny, she joked with her mother and the staff as we treated her for dehydration. The fact that she didn't even look sick made her diagnosis that much more shocking.

I firmly believe that no life is any more or less valuable than another, but there is something about a patient in what should be the prime of her life quickly dying from cancer that seems especially tragic.

Cancer sucks.

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