tiny little griefs

sifting softly through difficult cases

Monday morning I went into work and had perhaps one of the most devastating mornings I’ve had thus far as a PA.

It wasn’t any one thing, but rather a variety of things that were like little paper cuts. By lunch time, it felt like an open wound.

I ended the morning about an hour behind and still had the rest of the afternoon to face. At various points during each of these encounters, I was fighting back tears. By lunchtime, I was numb and close to despondence.

There is a lot of grief in the minutiae of medicine. Sometimes it’s loud; you lose patients that you care for and about. Other times it’s softer - witnessing, holding space for, and taking on the grief and suffering of your patients. You grieve for them and with them.

In this post, I’m talking about the weird dance with peripheral grief of this work. It’s not an earth shattering, life changing grief (most of the time, anyways). Though it does require an extraordinary amount of processing that clinic time doesn’t always allow for. I’m exploring not only the moments when I lost a patient I cared for, but also the tiny little griefs accumulated on a daily basis.

As I noted above, I’m not going to pretend losing a patient or sitting with patients during challenging times is anything like the monumental, life-altering grief of losing someone or something central to you. If you are currently grieving, know that I am thinking of you and sending warm thoughts, and this may be a post to skip.