Musings from hospital encounters

Musings from hospital encounters

As 3rd year medical students at a school in North Carolina in the good ole USA, we are required to write a medical narrative for a particularly poignant clinical encounter during our inpatient pediatrics rotation.

Perhaps my most moving, thought-provoking patient encounter about a year ago emanates from my interaction with a 6 year old boy. He is no ordinary child, even amongst the relatively small subset of kids who have had to be hospitalized. He has been dealt a most cruel fate, one that will inescapably take away his life prematurely. Having been diagnosed with HIV before he could even walk, he has been saddled physically by a disease process that has brought him to the hospital well over 100 times during the course of his young life. This virus has ravaged his immune system to the point of almost entirely wiping out his body’s main defense: CD4+ T cells. He essentially has full-blown AIDS.

But don’t be fooled by anything I’ve told you so far. This little boy is possessed with an indomitable spirit unlike any I have seen in a long while. His outward demeanor completely belies the devastation happening on the interior. I often thought to myself that if I didn’t know he had HIV, what in the world was this jovial kid doing in the hospital? Full of playfulness and seemingly boundless energy, I could not help but be swept away in the storm of his perpetual merriment. His exuberance rarely waned, even when his illness seemed to be getting the better of him.

But alas, I know he will more than likely not live very long. And in his mind, he must know that he is sicker than most kids he sees. Death is a reality that lurks in the background, ready to strike at any moment now. But death doesn’t bother me too much. This is due perhaps to the peculiarities of my own upbringing. An upbringing with the ever-present idea that death should not be feared as it is merely a part of the natural order of things. An upbringing in a culture where death is seen everyday and not hidden away in hospitals or nursing homes or in other places where most people in today’s Western society are shielded from the reality of death. An upbringing in a city on the banks of the Ganges river in northern India, where death, if it occurs there, is considered auspicious and portends liberation.

In spite of my philosophical view of death and dying, it will be a shame when this little boys passes on from this life. His everlasting enthusiasm is something that has deeply touched me. He has lived life happy and not afraid of what ill things may come to him. I will never forget him. Would that our maker could sow the seeds of his infinite positivity in all mankind”