In which I am a frail, mortal man.
At that time, men began to call upon the name of Jehovah (Gen. 4:26).
We do not save people and give them a ticket to heaven; on the contrary, we labor and struggle to present them full-grown in Christ. This takes decades. In a very real sense, once we begin to shepherd someone, we must shepherd him forever. This is our job.
Crystallization study of Colossians, message 4.
Events that remind me that I am a frail, mortal man:
- Thinking doors are locked, only to see someone else walk through with ease sometime later. No, it wasn’t locked. It was just heavy.
- I sleep on the floor, so my echo dot is on the floor. Stubbing my toes on Alexa actually gives me several seconds of painful pause.
- Bar chords.
- Holding on to that one note in I Dreamed a Dream. You know which one I’m talking about. Shame.
- Eating, then realizing I hadn’t washed my hands and I had just gotten off the subway. And held a pole.
I feel like a lifetime has passed since the last time I wrote. Rather than taking a winter break, like most people, I feel like winter break took me: for a dizzying few weeks of California sunlight. Three weeks into my new, white-coated life, I’m still (figuratively) shaking the sand out of my sneakers and blinking to adjust to the dimly lit radiology reading rooms.
Quick impressions of my life now. I hope to be able to do these for each of my different rotations, but times are tight (pun intended) so I will settle for my best.
[HIPAA disclaimer, I’m going to share stories as I experience them, but for the sake of patient privacy, I won’t get into specifics about patients’ identifying factors, diagnoses, or treatments. I’ve changed little details so that none of what I am relating can be traced back to any individual patient. Any correlation between real events and what I’m sharing will be coincidental.]
Finally school has me up before everyone else in the house. If it weren’t for the bitter cold (saving money, burning calories, two birds, one sad uncomfy stone), I would be happy to bumble about my morning routine, sipping tea alone, telling the Lord about whatever wacko dream I just woke up from and giving Him myself, yet again.
Morning didactics are endless scribblings in my notebook. Will I remember what was fired off at rapid pace by the neurologist? Maybe not. But it keeps me from falling asleep. Not so at noon lectures. I play a game of angling my head behind the guy in front of me (thank You, Lord, for poofy hair) so the lecturer can’t see that my eyes are shut. None of the residents are fooled, however—some make good-natured jokes, others give me knowing looks as I sheepishly wake. I am a frail, mortal man.
Radiology rounding is a lot of sitting in chairs in dark rooms. Rather than typing out their notes by hand, each radiologist quietly recites their findings into dictophones. I have to keep eating my snack stash just to stay awake. Sometimes the drowse hits me mid-chew.
The breadth of their knowledge, however, astounds me. These doctors have to know all about every organ system and anatomical structure in the body, and all the ways the diseases could present on imaging. One resident said, “I chose radiology because I love the mental challenge. It’s like doing puzzles all day long.” Of course, when I came in on a late afternoon another day, the same guy said, “Okay, now I’m counting lung lobes. It’s the most boring thing we ever have to do. You don’t want to watch this.” So it’s not all Good Will Hunting in there 100% of the time.
Moment: I was watching an attending read a PET scan, a follow-up for a woman with skin cancer. Her last read more than half a year ago, which showed cancer lit up in orange, was projected on the right half of the screen. Her newest read was spic and span. My attending remarked with satisfaction, “I finally get to give good news!” She began to rapid-fire dictate the note, a mile a minute, heedless of whether the dictation software could keep up with her (it did).
The resident next to her called her over to check out his patient. It was also a follow-up scan, a few months after remission was declared for the patient’s cancer, an aggressive lymphoma. The right side of the resident’s screen showed the cancer-free scan. The new scan on the left elicited a gasp from the attending. I couldn’t help but gasp, too. The patient’s entire omentum, the fatty cover of the abdominal viscera, was glowing. The cancer relapse blanketed the woman’s organs. She was younger than the other cancer patient—much younger than my parents. Her follow-up scan was only after two months—much less time than the other patient.
I asked the resident, who was still rotating the scan with a little disbelief. “Should we call her oncologist?”
The attending cut in. “I wouldn’t. For us, that’s devastating, but tragedy is just another Tuesday in the week of an oncologist. He’ll read the report when he gets to it.”
After a few more glances, I rolled my chair back to the attending’s station. Despite the dark, the pangs of sleep did not return that afternoon.
Prove all things.
1 Thes. 5:21.
Sometimes in daily Bible reading, some verses have unexpected weight. This is one of them.
