Sick

Ill with a gastroenteritis this weekend, I remembered what it is like to be sick. Fevers, chills, rigors - I felt miserable. The cytokine storm landed me on the couch enshrouded in blankets as I tried to prepare my M&M talk this coming week. Every time I get ill, I imagine what it must feel like to be a patient and I write a blog about it. But I really can't imagine and wouldn't want to know what it's like to feel this shivery and sick, and be in a strange place with generic blankets, people constantly poking and prodding me, surrounded by the beeping and alarms of machines. How hard it must be to feel like this and be asked to work with physical therapy. How discouraging it must be to be stuck in this state for days, weeks, months. How emotionally traumatic it must be to be restrained to a bed or to lose the ability to think and communicate. If I feel so awful with a simple stomach bug, imagine how an octogenarian must feel admitted for pneumonia or urinary sepsis. When I think of why I go into medicine, I think of trying to alleviate suffering and pain, but instances like this remind me how raw such discomfort feels and rekindles my motivation to alleviate the suffering of others.