Dr. Jennifer Brosser, MD
Affiliation: Department of General Surgery, University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics
The anatomy lab is left behind during the late night hours within me, even at midnight I can still feel the tendons of a hand reaching out for that white cord drawn under a fluorescent light, and can see an opened sternum asking a question that none of us have been able to adequately answer. I take too many of the memories of the hospital home with me in small pieces: the antiseptic stings my sleeves, the hollow thump disappears from under my fingers, and the profound quiet that follows the monitors after they give up.
There was a time I thought medicine was a world of certainties, a world of tangible reality, where diseases measured solely by their shapes and numbers were a defined quantity. In classes and lecture halls I have learned to memorize the complexities of surviving. The complex nesting of arteries. The complex vocabulary associated with many diseases. But there are no professors who can teach you how the grief of the absent lives in the surfaces of elevator mirrors or when the exhaustion caused by our between-shift adventures begins to take on a nearly religious feel. Nonetheless, we will go on each morning.
Coffee-hazed hands.
Tired eyes.
Stacks of paperwork lie before us reminding us that we have been awake for too many hours.
But beneath all of the tiredness is hope, a hope that through the knowledge of all of this we may achieve mercy.
Art by Adobe Stock, Medical and Humanities