Patient Stories #2: "Today is a good day."

By my standards I would have called this morning a bad one.

I did nothing in my prescribed morning routine. I spent way too much time on social media reading about things that didn’t concern me, and it put me in a bad mood. I didn’t eat breakfast before going to the hospital. While on rounds, I asked a dumb question and felt humiliated.

I was still mulling when we came to our last patient. He was a man in his late 40s who looked much older. His body had been ravaged by metastatic colon cancer which had eaten its way up to his lungs, his liver and his spine. It was the spine metastases that landed him in our hospital. He was now status post a huge spinal fusion. After leaving this hospital, he was slated for multiple weeks of radiation therapy that would likely only prolong his life by a couple of years.

That morning, he had a lucid conversation with our attending for the first time. He was happy with himself for multiple reasons. We marveled with him when he announced that he was able to eat his entire breakfast. (He normally was full after just a few bites.) When my attending asked him to lift his legs off the floor, he did it and surprised himself — he didn’t think he would be able to do it. His back pain wasn’t too terrible. He was awake, and he liked being awake. (“I was so drowsy the last time I talked to you — I could barely keep my eyes open.”) After recounting all of these small victories, he concluded, “Today is a good day.”

It hit me like a brick. Here I had been mulling about my state and the state of the world, and this guy was happy to be able to eat breakfast.

That feeling followed me the whole day. I watched patients struggle to lay in bed without triggering back pain. I watched them carefully walk up and down steps, relearning the very things that they and I had mastered as babies. I watched a patient who was close to my age struggle to speak in full sentences after being paralyzed out of nowhere by Guillain-Barre syndrome.

I left feeling very different than I had previously. Nothing was different. I was still in LA in the middle of a pandemic, but my eyes had changed. I reveled in the gloriously sunny day, letting the sun warm me up after being in a very cold hospital. I bought myself some of my favorite snacks and was grateful to be able to eat them all with no difficulty. I took a walk around campus before going home.

Today was a good day. So was yesterday. Any day where I wake up with my life and my health and friends and family near and far is a good day. So far, by those standards, I’m doing pretty good.