Compassion

My work involves a lot of death. As an intensive care specialist, I care for people who are at the extremes of physiology, often pulling them back from the very brink of death. Equally often, the battle is a lost one, the body slipping away into another world. So, on a near daily basis, I sit down with grieving families to talk about death. 

No matter how many times I have the same conversation, it is different every time. Lying in the anonymous sterile ICU hooked up to a myriad of machines, it is easy to think that the patient is anyone. But each person has an identity. They are someone's father, someone's son, someone's lover, someone's friend. When the loved ones gather and bring the patient to life with their stories, it is both enriching to the doctor-patient relationship and challenging to the doctor's soul. 

For it is far easier at this point to walk away, to stop at the end of the medical words and leave the family to grieve. "There's nothing more we can do, I'm sorry" may be the easiest words to say at this point.  

But some of us stay. Often it is the nursing staff who sit patiently with tissues and cups of tea, offering condolences and wisdom. But often a doctor will be driven to do the same - to sit in the silence of loss with those who are in deep indescribable pain. 

Why do we do it? 

Compassion - from the Greek words 

con- with 

and 

passion- to suffer. 

So, what is the purpose of suffering with the family? 

I believe it is a human quality to acknowledge the suffering of others as a form of spiritual support. To walk away in the most vulnerable of times may be occupationally acceptable or even expected of doctors. But to face mortality, that of others reflected in our own, takes a great deal of strength and awareness. It is also a drain on our own humanity - to give something of ourselves other than intellectual knowledge is inevitably so.  

Nevertheless, the cycle of life continues. Day after day I sit with dying patients and their families. I watch the emotions evolve all around me, and remark upon the incredible breadth and depth of life. 

One day, I will cease to be and I will no longer feel any of this. But just for now, I want to continue this quest to share some feeling, some compassion with these people. For I am human.