Over the course of a career you see a lot of patients. I'd guess, based on looking through my charts, roughly 30,000-40,000 to date.
Most, especially the ones from the very beginning, are long forgotten. Sometimes I'll request old hospital records on someone from a place where I did a rotation and am surprised to see a note from a younger version of myself. And I have no recollection of them at all.
But a handful never leave you. Some because you learned a lot from them. Others because of a shared interest you chatted with them about. And a few because they struck a chord that's never gone away.
I was at the tail end of my intern year, doing a mandatory ICU rotation, when they brought him in. I don't remember his name now, mainly because I never knew it then, either.
He was a homeless man, who'd fallen asleep in a trash dumpster. In the dark early morning no one saw him fall into the back of a garbage truck when the container was emptied. With the noise of the engine no one heard his screaming as he was mashed by the machinery. When the truck was emptied a few hours later sanitation employees called 911.
He was still alive - barely - when we got him. Massive blood loss and multi-system trauma. Broken bones, ruptured viscera, missing pieces of limbs. Teams of doctors paraded in & out of the room trying to save him. As an intern I was one of them, but on the periphery of the internal medicine group.
What was left of his clothes had no ID, and he was never conscious. Social workers tried to find family, a name, anything. They combed missing person databases and made endless phone calls all over the country. Nothing really to go on, not even a tattoo. Just a 50-ish white male. Police spoke to other homeless who lived in the area. A few remembered him, but none knew his name or anything about him.
For a week in the never-ending daylight of the ICU an army of doctors, nurses, RT's, lab techs, and others did their best to keep him alive. Although his prognosis was grim, we all thought that, sooner or later, the social workers would turn up a friend, or relative, or find some lead to them. He was, after all, somebody's son. Or brother. Or father. If there was someone out there who might be able to tell us what he'd want, or even who just wanted to say goodbye to him, we'd give them that chance.
But it never happened. Roughly a week after he came in the attending doctors felt there was no hope and nothing further to be done. The machines were turned off one by one and he died quickly. Someone on the trauma service signed a brief death note and reached for the next chart. The body was taken away to an unmarked grave. I couldn't find it today if I tried.
I'm sure somewhere out there is an argument about how much money was spent on his case, and how many vaccines or school lunches or police or teacher salaries it could have paid for. Given how many cases there probably are like his, and multiply by that number... I'm sure it's a lot of dollars. But, while it has some points, that debate didn't occur to me at the time, isn't why I still remember him, and I'll leave it to other blogs to discuss.
Regardless of the circumstances of his life - I admit I'd have ignored him on the street if he'd asked me for change the day before - he died alone. Did he have any living family? Do any of them wonder what happened to him, then or now? Were they sick of whatever issues he had again and again, and had long pushed him out of their minds? Did he have a good childhood or was he always on the streets? Did he serve his country? Was he hoping to die in the dumpster or just looking for a little more shelter than the sidewalk offered that night?
Alone.
25-30 years later I can still see him as they brought him to ICU, the different teams of doctors yelling orders. For a week I'd sometimes sit at the nurses station and stare at him, wondering. Did anyone else working on the case find themselves as bothered as I was? Maybe we just all covered it up, afraid that to admit he was anything but a badly injured homeless guy would be a sign of weakness. I may be the only person today who even remembers him at all.
Alone.
The case still keeps me up at night. Thinking of him, and behind that the abject terror of the thought of someday myself, or my wife, or kids, or other loved ones or friends, being in the same situation. Alone. Impoverished with nothing. Unloved. A life and existence forgotten.
Alone.
