Mysticism on call

I’m starting to develop a sixth sense about some of my patients. I will decide to wander by a patient’s room at the exact instant when he goes into ventricular tachycardia. I will transfer a patient from the ward to the ICU hours before his heart fails and he needs BiPAP and other supportive measures. I regularly wake up in the middle of the night and start getting dressed a few minutes before my pager goes off, summoning me to the bedside of a patient who has just gone into flash pulmonary edema.

On Monday afternoon, I went to check on a patient who was transferred from a rural hospital to us. He was 90 years old, mildly demented and extremely septic. I walked in just in time to see him trying to pull his IV line out. I grabbed his hand and looked around for something to secure his IV with… nothing in reach. Fortunately, the nurse displayed a sixth sense of her own and walked by the room right then. We had a nice chat about our patient and decided to try mild sedation, which the nurse left the room to draw up.

In the meantime, I held my patient’s hand. I spoke to him gently, and gradually his nervous movements calmed. Oddly, the experience took me to a moment far in the future, when my boyfriend is old and at the end of his life. I felt linked to that still distant time, as though the comfort I was giving this elderly stranger was somehow being passed along to my sweetheart in the future (Jeff is undoubtedly reading this and wondering why I was picturing him on his deathbed).

It was a busy day on call… there were impatient patients in the ER to be seen, discharge summaries to be dictated, pages to be answered, EKGs to be interpreted, and a rice bowl in my lunch bag to be inhaled. But for one pure moment, it was just me, my patient, and the future.