End Notes
On Seeing Beauty
Medical practice presents us with beauty every day, if only we look for it.
By Burgess E. Norrgard
A man sat calmly on a bed in the ER. He had come looking for relief from a cough and runny nose. But an exam showed his heart beat noticeably fast, and the telemetry indicated “sinus tachycardia.” With medication, his heart’s pace slowed. But the next EKG would read “bundle branch block,” and a day later, sound waves would paint this portrait of his heart: “ejection fraction 30%.” A week later, an angiogram would read, “significant three-vessel disease.” He sat in the ER, innocent, unaware of what was happening inside his body. When our translation was delivered, he slumped as if he had been hit by a bullet.
A month later, the same man stood up when we entered the exam room, as if the Queen of England had suddenly walked through the door. The incisions on his legs had already scarred and his heart no longer raced. When the follow-up was finished, he stood again in awkward silence and expressed his gratitude with a piercing gaze and handshake that had enough gravity behind it to send shivers up my spine.
To him, we had saved his life. We knew we had gotten lucky.
The snow fell lightly outside the window of a hospital room. Inside, a patient struggled to breathe as fluid inexplicably filled his lungs. For a month, he had been bedridden as we exhausted possible explanations with tests that provided no answers. Yet when the fluid was drained, he slowly crept back to his former state. I arrived one morning and offered to help him into a chair, his first time to be seated upright in a month. He sat back as if on a throne of dignity and wept, his tears expressing joy in this simple act of living. The man left the hospital with few answers about the cause of his condition.
He and I both, however, had a greater understanding of the rapture of being alive.
As a medical student, I can observe the poignancy of the human condition every day. I have only to banish distractions to see it. Medicine endows physicians with such gifts. If only we stop to notice and admire what we are given. MM
Burgess Norrgard is a fourth-year medical student at the University of Minnesota.