The Day She Broke Medicine
Over the first 8 months of this year, I spent 50 hours observing doctors in hospitals. With no authority beyond my little blue badge, whose magic logo opened to me closed exam room doors and secured units, I pushed aside literal and metaphorical curtains to reveal moments of frailty and fear and peace and humor, moments at the threshold of life and the threshold of death. I was a silent observer of the wild jungle of medicine, in which strangers in white coats hold the keys to hope and life, and in which everyday people look up high at the looming white coats with glimmers of salvific expectation in their eyes.
But the wild jungle of medicine is more than a controlled environment in which white coats administer pills of cure and tests of omniscience to fragile mortal beings. {It is more than a power differential} It is a technocracy, a machine, which is self-perpetuating and which can swallow us whole if we do not pay attention, or if we allow it to be for us the truest site of healing.
One morning I witnessed a family spend their last few hours with their baby daughter, after deciding to withdraw her ventilator and allow her to peacefully pass into eternity. They would donate her organs. The logistics of this decision were staggering; so was the symbolic meaning of such a decision. "No," they said, "the machines of medicine will not solve her suffering. We decide to end our turning on the rabbit wheel of death-escape; we decide to end our battle with mortality."
The dosage limits on morphine had to be overridden. Would the IVs even physically push enough at once? Rooms were moved and tables prepared and surgeons summoned. The well-oiled machine of nursing staff and physicians became a jumbled mess of "when?" and "where?" and "how?" and "who will..."
For one morning, the procedural machine had halted.
A cog in the engine had jammed.
Someone had jammed a spoke into the wheel of medicine, and it was not the powers that be; it was not the tall white coats; it was a little girl.
All eyes were on a little baby girl.
There is much to critique in the hospital, and much I will work to improve. But what moved me most that day had nothing to do with systems improvement, the right policies, or procedures to protect vulnerable patients. It was the fact that there are still times, and hallelujah there are times, when the least among us actually break medicine. They are the children, the people, I want to listen to -- the ones who know healing and wholeness is not a scientific discovery, and more is not always better, and technology won't end their suffering, and life can sometimes be found in death.
Hospitals are sites of physical healing, but to the extent that they perpetuate false salvation...
But the wild jungle of medicine is more than a controlled environment in which white coats administer pills of cure and tests of omniscience to fragile mortal beings. {It is more than a power differential} It is a technocracy, a machine, which is self-perpetuating and which can swallow us whole if we do not pay attention, or if we allow it to be for us the truest site of healing.
One morning I witnessed a family spend their last few hours with their baby daughter, after deciding to withdraw her ventilator and allow her to peacefully pass into eternity. They would donate her organs. The logistics of this decision were staggering; so was the symbolic meaning of such a decision. "No," they said, "the machines of medicine will not solve her suffering. We decide to end our turning on the rabbit wheel of death-escape; we decide to end our battle with mortality."
The dosage limits on morphine had to be overridden. Would the IVs even physically push enough at once? Rooms were moved and tables prepared and surgeons summoned. The well-oiled machine of nursing staff and physicians became a jumbled mess of "when?" and "where?" and "how?" and "who will..."
For one morning, the procedural machine had halted.
A cog in the engine had jammed.
Someone had jammed a spoke into the wheel of medicine, and it was not the powers that be; it was not the tall white coats; it was a little girl.
All eyes were on a little baby girl.
There is much to critique in the hospital, and much I will work to improve. But what moved me most that day had nothing to do with systems improvement, the right policies, or procedures to protect vulnerable patients. It was the fact that there are still times, and hallelujah there are times, when the least among us actually break medicine. They are the children, the people, I want to listen to -- the ones who know healing and wholeness is not a scientific discovery, and more is not always better, and technology won't end their suffering, and life can sometimes be found in death.
Hospitals are sites of physical healing, but to the extent that they perpetuate false salvation...
“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” - Bonhoeffer
Comments
Post a Comment