Geography Lessons
It’s truly surreal to witness the severity and brevity of Life day in and day out like some cyclical orbit of continuous disarray. Almost as if the solar system was on a constant playback orchestrated by a maestro indifferent to the tunes and chorus of the work as the same song plays over and over until you can hear it in your sleep. Rhyme and reason do not tarry on the precipice of reality.
For every ER shift, I pass through a cognitive transition, intentionally, as I cross the threshold of ambulance bay doors into a state of mind and function quite distinct from the man my family sees each day. Who I am on shift is not who I am in our living room. These two men are not the same. They cannot be.
On the one hand, I have to perform and reason through complex processes of life and death, weighing the risk and benefit of an intervention, medication, procedure, or diagnostic study as seconds tick past me like arrows from the distant horizon. On the other, I struggle to know when and where school pickup is and what everyone wants in their lunch box the following day. I mishandle grocery lists and after-school functions and sadly I must admit I’m likely much more talented in the hospital than I am as “Dad” at times.
Occasionally, when at work and in that state of perpetual stress and multi-tasking, my kids will reach out in texts or phone calls asking for minuscule things very important to them of course, and yet on the scale of priority, are far below the now. I remind myself to conscientiously transition back and forth between these two men for it is important to them, no matter how small I think it to be. It is important to me that they feel that I am present.
Last night was such a night. The cruelty of sudden death and trauma stained my wherewithal of focus with no room for error or mishap. I struggled to balance the end of one life that had celebrated fifty years of marriage as his dutiful wife held hands at the bedside while in the same hour I froze, listening to the shrill forsaken cries of a mother as she rubbed the feet of her unresponsive teenager. Two lives lost through an unfairness that even to this day I have no more of an explanation as to the “why” as a middle-aged father than I did when I participated in my childhood friends’ funerals long ago. No logic or balanced karma it would seem, but simply cold entropy of an immeasurable loss, cyclical and repetitive. Indifferent.
As I stood there watching over my youngest patient while his parents mourned, I realized his hair was the color of my son’s and his feet could easily fit in my son’s shoes. Similar age. Similar height. Vastly different outcomes. Comprehension of the “why” be damned.
It was in this cruelest hour of my shift that my oldest called. He was frustrated and angry at his homework, and at 11:00 pm when he should be asleep, he was struggling with freshman Geography and an assignment due in the morning. He vented, cussed a little, and asked me to stay on the phone to help him, clearly not knowing what I was struggling with at work. He had no concept of where I was mentally and emotionally, and I can only hope that throughout his lifetime, he never will. For him in that moment, his trial was significant though with my perspective I knew this merely to be a piece of paper. It wasn’t the end of the world, but on that phone call you could have been convinced that it was for him.
I wanted to tell him what I witnessed and how it made me feel. I wanted to tell him how much my patient looked like him and as a father how much that tore at something sacred I tried to always desperately protect and hide when on shift. But as I stood there with the family wailing in the background of the hospital halls, I listened intently to my son’s voice. I needed that phone call probably more than he’ll ever realize.
Though the timing was imperfect, I wanted nothing more than to hear his voice and know that he was okay. He was miles away in the safety of his bedroom, staying up late to be the straight-A student that he is. The irony was not lost on me that what would seemingly be little more than an interruption of my work flow in a busy trauma center had actually been my lifeline in the moment to come back to reality and look forward to coming home.
Geographic meridian lines and their significance had never resonated for me beforehand, but now they seemed quite crucial, and for a moment, as brief as it was, we worked on that together. We were on the phone long enough for me to breathe and realize that we are all just merely imperfect mortal humans, swimming through the same cosmic dust, and sometimes nothing matters more than coming up for air and treading for as long as it may take before we feel whole again. -csc