I tossed and turned one night and woke up to look at the time. Drat. It was only 2 am. It was warm and having slept on my back for too long despite the cool night air, I had to stir and flip onto my side. My frustrated flip flopping like a fish had awoken my poor spouse. I suddenly had a flashback to two years ago when I visited my patient who was in her 80s and had been felled by a stroke that left her paralysed on one side of her body. She lay in her bed at home when I visited, mute, because the stroke had taken away her speech as well. She looked impassive.
"Hey Mom, look who is here to visit you!" her daughter said enthusiastically. Suddenly she turned her back towards me to face the wall. I was taken aback thinking I had been slighted. Then using her good arm, she grabbed the railing of her bed to pull herself onto her side; I realised that she was just hot. Her back was hot, and she was trying to cool her back, just as I was trying to do at 2 am.
Imagine lying on a bed with a plastic sheet beneath in muggy Singapore weather! And that was two years ago. Presently she is in a nursing home, completely paralysed by her second stroke. I had visited her in the nursing home too.
Hot tears flowed down my face as I laid in my bed thinking, "How horrible, to feel hot and to have no physical ability to turn onto one's side by oneself." I prayed that her mind was taken too by now, or she would be aware of being a prisoner in her own body.
These are times when I feel like I might want to quit medicine because these kinds of things grieve me. But I don't think it is my time to do that yet.