Journal Entry 7/01/26
There was a dead patient on the ward today.
I didn’t know the patient. She was admitted during the holidays. I did not see her yesterday, and I did not see as she passed today. I got to the ward, and there was a bed with a body. Partly shielded from view, but if you went around the shield, you could see it. See her. Stiff underneath a blanket. She was 14. I heard a doctor say it was probably cardiogenic shock.
Her heart stopped working.
People always assume that being around medicine and bodies all the time, you become desensitised to how both of these things fail each other and themselves and I guess to a certain extent they are right. But they’re also wrong. I kept sneaking glances at that stiff body. Somewhere in my brain, I assumed she would stand up and laugh...all 14 years of her, up and alive. That did not happen. It would be frightening if it had.
The presence of that body clouded my brain. I do not know why exactly.
I kept thinking of the now finite vastness of who she must have been. I wondered about her siblings if she had any. I wondered about her friends. Did she go to school? Did she have a best friend hoping she would be back home? Does her dying irreparably alter this best friend’s life like mine did when my best friend died? Do her parents know how many loved her outside of them?
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The ward felt suffocating. It felt like she would be there forever. I wanted her parents to come claim her already. I wanted them not to because maybe… maybe she could stand up. I’m listening to Funeral by Lukas Graham as I write this and thinking about the expanse of grief and yet I cannot understand how people do this.
It felt very odd — being there in that ward and watching everyone come and go, the nurses laughing, the doctors talking to other medical students, the mother mechanically coming in and out to pack their things — it all felt unreal.
There was a dead girl in the room and I wanted to scream. I wanted to scream. I am aware that the world can not stop every time a person dies. .
If it did, the world would never go anywhere, but still it was so surreal. I wanted to run away. I didn’t want to be part of this life where the inevitability of mortality stared you in the face every day. People always say it is exceedingly painful when an infant or a newborn dies because they didn’t get to experience anything of life yet. I think it is more cruel when they do get to live it, and it is snatched.
Children should not die.
Teenagers should not die. Maybe I’ll feel better about the dying nature of bodies the more years I spend chasing this line of work but today where I have been away from school for 2 weeks and being thrust back into it, it is too much today.
Today was too much.
I’m a 5th year medical student and I am currently on my 3rd month of a 4 month paediatric rotation.
I wrote this about two weeks ago on my first day back to the wards after the holidays. I might share more of my journal/diary entries because who am I as I writer if I do not show you gaping holes saying “Here. Here is where the bleeding is”. I hope this young girl is resting, and may God keep us all; the living, the dead, and the dying💘
