||: Can't Cry Hard Enough

||: This morning, while doing rounds with my team, our team captain talked to the daughter and relatives of one of our patients who had a periampullary tumor. They were appraised of the patient's condition and how her prognosis was not good. Options as to surgical management were laid and the possibility of just doing a palliative procedure was explained.

||: It was not until they were told the theoretical "textbook" life expectancy of patients with periampullary tumors when I started noticing the patient's daughter wiping off tears from her face. She battled to remain resilient, however grief was winning over her, as can be seen by her facial expression.

||: I haven't had mortalities for the past few month (except for a high-risk PPU patient who didn't have any relatives with him and a Jane Doe who was multiply injured in a vehicular crash). Although this isn't a mortality, the grief I saw on the patient's daughter made me feel like it was.

||: This is why I'm reposting this entry from my old blog -- because these are the memories and emotions that the incident flooded my mind with. It's about my views on death and dying....

||: One of the things I hate doing most in the hospital is to pronounce the death of a patient to his relatives. Doing this really makes me feel horrible. I know how emotionally traumatic it is for a person from a non-medical field to see a loved one being resuscitated from an impending roadtrip with the grim reaper. As if witnessing this isn’t more than enough for them, I have to jab them with the info that our attempts to revive the patient have gone in vain, then following it up with the heart-stabbing fact that their loved-one is, uuuhhh, dead. Wouldn’t that make you feel repulsive? No matter how I try to make the pronouncement as condoling and sympathetic as possible, it still feels awkward each time.

||: I haven’t been in the hospital for the past 2 months, and during this "vacation", I haven’t seen and attended to any deaths. The other day was my 3rd day in the hospital after coming back from my so-called "vacation" in Jesus dela Peña and the City of River, and I had to pronounce the death of a patient to his wife and siblings. He was in his late 20’s, just about my age, and a multiple gunshot victim. The fatal shot was the one which entered on his right temporal area and exited on his left tragus. He expired 9 hours and 3 CP arrests later. Although his family was primed from the moment they arrived that he would not live, their muffled weeping still brimmed over with much sorrow when I told them that we could no longer revive him during his third and last arrest.

||: Pronouncing someone’s death may make my throat feel lumpy each time, but death is something that I do not fear. Having witnessed and being exposed to an assortment of ways to die have probably calloused my emotion from the fear of it. Although I do not want to die a violent death nor be resuscitated when I go into a CP arrest, I am not frightened by dying. My exposure to deaths may have helped me accept the fact that death is an inevitable end. Sorry if I sound crass and morbid, but this is an inevitable truth for all of us.

||: Some may just go ahead of us, but we all eventually get there… and we don’t know when. Everytime I witness the face of death, I am reminded of how short life is and how we should live each day as if it’s our last. Well, before I sound more and more cliché-ish, I would just like to share this song which I tell my friends to play during my funeral. Again, sorry for the morbidity of the issue, but this is what I really want to be played (or sung… I even already told my bestfriend to sing it for me if he lives longer than I do) during  my funeral.

||:  I first heard this song back in grade school. I was in grade 5 then, if I recall it correctly. This was written and sung by the Williams Brothers. Although the song is really a love song, it may well talk about the departure of a person who has touched someone deeply. This is how I want to live and be remembered. My frequent exposure to death constantly reminds me to live well… and each time, I do silently thank the patients for reminding me to live each day as if it were my last, and that their deaths are not in vain because it has deeply touched a life… mine.

||: Here’s the lyrics of the song, to help me make you understand much better why I like this song sung as I go into my final goodnight…

I’m gonna live my life

Like everyday’s the last

Without a simple goodbye

It all goes by so fast

And now that you’re gone

I can’t cry hard enough

No I can’t cry hard enough

For you to hear me now

I’m gonna open my eyes

And see for the first time

I’ve let go of you like

A child letting go of his kite

There it goes, up in the sky

There it goes, beyond the clouds

For no reason why

I can’t cry hard enough

No I can’t cry hard enough

For you to hear me now

Gonna look back in vain

And see you standing there

But all that remains is an empty chair

And now that you’re gone

I can’t cry hard enough

No I can’t cry hard enough

For you to hear me now

There it goes, up in the sky

There it goes, beyond the clouds

For no reason why

I can’t cry hard enough

No I can’t cry hard enough

For you to hear me now.