One mother's love

“Movies always give a certain anticipation to know about the end.” When tension for a follow up act is missing, we usually lose interest in a movie. In about two hours, we assume to have understood and appreciated one’s life’s story. In it, we settle the palpitations with the knowledge that this is after all fiction and the "dead are not dead" but instead suspended from any further set. Oh, how I wish life could actually be.

I decided a long time ago that I could only watch horror movies only if they are the last left for my own obvious reasons (It’s always normal to look forward to a nice ending). As a new career doctor, the reality of death becomes passive. You tend to become supple to the fact that it probably shouldn’t have happened had it just been fiction with a good ending. A good ending, it is almost always evasive when faced with the most challenging of the cases.

I have most recently come close to one such case where I almost brought now the walls of my still and emotionless being in a clinical environment. Compassion, an adjunct to the sick is one I only show whenever am not overwhelmed however passion is usually intrinsic and hard to push back. 
The case is about a female child of 20 years brought into my care with an acute chest syndrome. After a  zillion hospital admissions, this was to be the last time she was in the hospital. She was a patient of sickle cell anemia, 4^th born of a single mother but until recently caused estrangement between her elder siblings and their mother. 
You see, she had growth retardation due to a stroke (bled in her brain) at the age of 10 and since then hospitals had become her other abode. Subsequent unfortunate events meant she would never have a normal life but to be under constant care by her mother. A role only a mother’s love could take on and indeed she made no qualms about it and vowed to do that all her life. In return she forgot to notice how lost time and relationships had moved.

Every morning, I walked past the bed they shared and at all those times this mother held her daughter in an embrace of never to let her go. She fed, bathed and nursed her at each minute of the day. They lived their lives synced. 
I always made it my starting point when beginning my ward rounds, adjusted the treatments accordingly and followed up twice a day. Investigations we had carried out were never comforting, but between the doctors taking care of her we kept this information between ourselves, one last bit was shared with her when almost all hope was evaporating. Soon her situation deteriorated  and she developed acute kidney injury (her kidneys had started failing to excrete the wastes from the body). This we noticed was secondary to sepsis (as per evidence of infection and systemic inflammatory response syndrome). Even at this point we soldiered on.

This “little” girl’s situation became hopeless each passing day two weeks after but witnessing the mother’s love gave me extra motivation to go an extra mile. There was always a sign of despair but with interludes of hope, we believed and prayed for a miracle it was never to be. How shattered, the mother was when the daughter passed on in her sleep on a Sunday morning while they shared their sleep.

Oh, how I wished this was a movie and someone shouted “cut” and then we moved on to the next act. As intern doctors we are faced with many challenges and at times with far reaching consequences than we ever thought of. The love, care and concern of a doctor is at times driven by the changes in environment and previous experiences and nothing will ever prepare for this.

With each imagination one might harbor, you wish someone waves by and off they go home healthier than they came.