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“A patient died a few years ago, and I can’t get o?—”
“I have one of those,” he interrupted so nonchalantly that I couldn’t believe my ears. “Early in my career, I made a mistake, and he died.”
I gulped. We’d never talked about this. He was always so calm with patients, always so level-headed and exhaustive, even when there was reason for concern, for urgency. We didn’t get many of those but maybe once a year. They would have to be driven to the closest hospital an hour away. But then they would be treated there, and it would have nothing to do with us. Handing them over. Exactly like I planned after Jazmín’s death.
“It was rough, yeah,” he said after a long silence.
“Only one?”
“It takes only one, Lucía, to realize you can’t save them all.” Tears were falling down my cheeks. I wanted to save them all, damn it. “But we do our damn best, and we try, don’t we?”
“Uh-huh.”
A fractured mosaic of feelings. Going from heartbroken to happy to sad to joyful in the span of a moment. Of a single life touched by our profession.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked. He moved his linked hands to the back of his head, elbows out, looking so relaxed, like this was a normal conversation. The skin of his hands looked so soft, like my grandmother’s, wrinkled with age but softened as the years passed.
“I’m embarrassed,” I admitted. “No one in the hospital reacted that way, and I feel like a failure.”
Three or so weeks after Jazmín had died, I had walked into the attending’s office and told him I was quitting. That I would be done with my residency, and I would, under no circumstances, be seeking out the fellowship spot for pediatric oncology. I couldn’t do it. It just wasn’t for me.
“Sit down,” he had said, walking over to the door to close it. It was the middle of our twelve-hour shift, and we were slammed. But he still took the time to speak to me, measuring his words. “You are a talented, empathetic doctor, Lucía.” He spoke quietly, a sad smile on his face. “Don’t let this one patient take that away from you. We need more doctors like you here.”
I shook my head at him, a lone tear falling down my cheek. My stethoscope was on my lap, and I wrapped the tubing around my finger in one direction, then the other one. Over and over again. He cleared his throat, then said, “Please don’t make a rash decision about this.”
I nodded then and stood up, draping my stethoscope around my neck. I left the office and walked swiftly towards the stairs, running down the steps towards the emergency department and out the ambulance bay. I couldn’t walk fast enough, the panic rising in my chest until I couldn’t hold it in any longer. A wail sounded among the shadows of the building that had given me so much but had taken so much too.
“Grief is a unique thing,” Dr. Martín said, pulling me back from the memories of that time, drowned by the loneliness and the singularity of my situation. “There is no timeline for it.”
And I agreed that grief was a weird thing. Because I could be completely fine for weeks and then,bam, it hit like a truck with no brakes.
He cocked his head, the silence burning between us. “It’s okay, honey,” he said. And at those words, I was gasping for air, looking for a way out of the depths of this horrible puddle, where the more I fought to get out, the deeper I sank. I bent at my waist, placing my forehead on my knees and crying loudly into my scrubs. So reminiscent of the night I gave everything up.
I felt his warm hand on my back, small, soothing motions on my skin.
“And that boy?”Oh fuck.That hurt. “He is good for you.”
“He’s her brother,” I said in between sobs, my breath catching after each word.
“Oh, honey.” I heard the pity in his voice first, and then Dr. Martín stood up. “I want to show you something.” I followed him with my eyes, his slow steps heading towards what had once been his office. “Come over here,” he said over his shoulder.
I stood up, wiping my tears with the back of my hands and grabbing a few tissues from Valentina’s desk. He was opening and closing the file cabinet drawers, running the tipof his finger over the manila folders, the names of our patients scribbled on the tabs in his clunky handwriting. “Right here.” He pulled out a file we hadn’t gotten to yet. It was in the bottom drawer, tucked halfway into the stack.
He moved some things around the tabletop and laid the folder flat, sitting on my chair while he scanned the patient form. I turned towards him, looping around to where he was behind my desk. I looked at the paper. It was an old form, yellowed at the edges and created using a typewriter, the font recognizable even to me. At the top, the name of a patient I didn’t recognize, and just below, scribbled by hand, the name of Dr. Martín’s wife.
“What?” My eyes flooded with tears again at the realization. How did I never know? This had to be town lore by now.
“My son.” His voice caught, and he licked his lips, his eyes going back and forth between my face and the form. “Appendicitis,” he said. “I didn’t catch it in time.”
“How?” I asked. It was one of the first things we learned how to recognize in residency, and those diagnoses were the majority of the cases we saw in the hospital, especially during our surgery rotations. Cut and dry—symptoms were always textbook with pediatric patients.
“The symptoms didn’t present until it ruptured.” He blinked.
“Oh my god.” My lower lip trembled. How did he even survive that?
“You learn to live with grief”—he stood up, smoothingout his slacks and tucking his hands in his pockets—“instead of letting it consume you, honey.”
He stared at me for a bit, then smiled, the wrinkles around his eyes on full display. “We can’t save them all, but the ones we can make this profession so, so worth it.”
