Excerpts From My Life, Circa 2025: Just One of Those Days

Pressure.

It’s all I feel as I walk out of room B.

I rip off my mask. A faint scent tickles my nose, but I barely register it. Four months in, the sharp, cloying stench that fills the unit has become commonplace. Some days, it’s even comforting, the way constant things can be.

Not today, though.

I adjust my bag over my shoulder and exit the unit.

My 12-hour shift ended an hour ago.

An hour. That’s how long I spent with Patient B’s family. A daily update turned goals-of-care discussion, then a conversation about a life barely lived. A life about to be lost.

I make it outside and am immediately hit by a wall of cold wind. Its fingers dry the tears beading at my eyes.

My crocs scrape against the graphite of the parking lot as I pick up my pace.

As I turn the corner onto the street, I slip. My hand grabs onto a wall. I pause for a second and try to breathe.

One. Two.

There’s a stone on my chest.

Stone.

Tombstone.

Death.

Death.

A knot forms in my throat, but I squeeze it down.

I will not break down here. Not right in front of my workplace.

I have to make it home.

I let go of the wall and hurry down the street.

Five minutes, I tell myself.

In five minutes, I’ll be home, where the walls are already full of my secret worries, the pillows familiar with my tears.

The wind picks up as my pace does, forcing its way into my nose. But instead of pushing through into my lungs, it stays in my throat, gathering and gathering until I can’t catch my breath.

The hair on my arms sticks up, and my fingers begin to tingle. Then they go numb.

My steps falter. I won’t make it home, I realize.

I take a sharp turn and dart into a deserted alley.

It smells of cigarettes and falling leaves.

I collapse against a wall and gulp for air.

In. Out.

My day plays like a record in my mind.

Just one of those days, I’d told a friend whom I’d passed on my way out earlier.

What else was there to say?

This is part of the job, after all.

Death. Dying.

Nothing new.

Not even when it’s a twenty-something-year-old who’s barely lived at all.

A loving son. Brother. Nephew. Uncle. And friend.

Oh, he has so many friends.

They come daily. As I make my rounds on the other patients, I hear them in room B. Playing music. Reminiscing about school. Memories my patient tries hard to remember, but cannot.

They make plans for holiday trips. Trips that they know and I know will not happen.

In front of him, they smile and laugh and play. Almost like the cancer is not in the room with them. But as they walk out, I see them swiping away tears.

But it’s his mother who devastates me.

She tells me little things about him. Things that make me feel like I know him.

She tells me how he’d lived with his cancer for a decade. How, in spite of his diagnosis, he did everything. He studied software engineering. He played basketball. He dated. He made time for family.

She tells me how they spent holiday after holiday in surgical wards and infusion centers. How things were just starting to look up. They were trying a new chemo. He was starting to be more energetic, happier, brighter. It felt like it was working. Like things were finally turning around.

And then the one CT scan that changed everything.

The cancer had spread everywhere. His organs started to fail. And he was back in the hospital.

On my team. In my hands.

Every day, this woman looks up at me with hope. Begging me to save her son.

Her son, who loves basketball, the color green, and Imagine Dragons.

Her son wants a tattoo. To travel the world. To have kids. To live.

He wants to live.

How do I tell her that I can’t help him live?

The tears begin then.

Not the storm I thought it would be, but a silent waterfall. Not frustration, but guilt. An apology.

I spent ten years from the first year of medical school to residency in the United States. Blood, sweat, and tears poured into the grind so I could learn how to save people.

After only four months, my shiny dream has become dull and tainted.

I’m not saving anyone.

I’m trying to. God, I’m trying to. But the disease is too far gone. The cancer too aggressive. The research too slow to catch up.

And yet, I have to show up every day, shame clinging to me as tight as my scrubs.

Because while I can’t save them, I have to try to keep them alive long enough to say goodbye. I have to smile in the morning, ask them how they’re doing, and assure them that I’ll be here. That whatever happens, they are surrounded by help. That they don’t have to be scared.

It isn’t the work I imagined, but it’s just as important.

Slowly, the tears dry.

My throat loosens, and air once again stutters into my lungs.

All at once, sensation returns. I feel the grittiness of the wall behind me. To my right, a jagged stone digs into my shoe. I’m once again hit by the smell of fall.

With almost comical timing, I feel a drop of moisture on my arm, then another. Then another.

Of course, it’s raining.

It’s so ridiculous that I start to laugh.

I dig out my umbrella from my bag and pull it open.

I glance at my watch. It’s almost 9 pm.

I have to hurry and get to bed.

Because I have work tomorrow.