One night I admitted an 89 YO female patient who was one of our "frequent flyers" due to chronic anemia, as well as a host of other medical problems. She came in every few weeks or so for GI bleeds requiring multiple blood transfusions, and on top of that she fell and fractured her pelvis 6 weeks prior to this admission, and she'd been in pain ever since.
Even with her critically low H&H, she was pleasant, cooperative, and did her best to "not be a burden to you girls" as she put it. As I started her IV and began the transfusion (which she bragged to her daughter "didn't even hurt!"), she began to talk about her full life, which had included two long and happy marriages as well as the births of nine children, running a business, and seeing all the changes the past nine decades had brought about.
Then, for some reason, we got to talking about losses........and she revealed that only six of her children had lived to adulthood, and one of those died of a massive MI at age 45, only a week after his 7-year-old son had been killed in a house fire. The other three she'd lost were a newborn, an 11-month-old, and a 19-month-old. Then she was widowed in her early 50s after a 30-year marriage to a man who told her, just before he passed away, whom he wanted her to marry after he was gone. Of course, at the time she was in shock and denied that it would ever happen, but sure enough, several years later she fell in love with this man and married him. They had twenty "wonderful, wonderful" years together before HE died and she was alone yet again, to face the tragic deaths of her son and grandson with only her living children "and the grace of Jesus" to sustain her. And on top of all that, she was the only one left of eleven siblings........all her brothers and sisters had passed on, the last one only a few months before.
Now, I've been through what I used to think was more than my fair share of tragedy......all that's left of my own family of origin is my sixtysomething-year-old sister, and I've buried several close friends as well as my second child. But as I listened to Rachel's story---told without the least hint of bitterness or self-pity---I couldn't help thinking how trifling my sorrows really were when compared with this woman's incredible suffering, and how beautiful she was despite the pallor of her skin and the pain which etched itself across her forehead.
Of course, I'll never know how she had arrived at that point.......surely she must have raged and cried, maybe even cursed God and the fates for taking her cherished loved ones from her. But her serenity in the face of the worst that life can dish out was genuine, and it struck me how sometimes we meet angels disguised as everyday human beings. And I couldn't help but think that there was a lesson in it for me........I'd been a bit cranky due to staffing cutbacks and the correspondingly increased workload, my back was out, and I badly needed a vacation. I was also disgusted with politics, and seriously concerned for my younger daughter who, at the time, was a soldier serving in Iraq.
All that seemed rather petty in the light of day, though, and maybe that's what that night's encounter was about. Sometimes I go about my life feeling somewhat injured, as though life has thrown me too many curves, and lately I've gotten the sense that I'm growing old and irrelevant. But all my woes, put together, are as pale as Rachel's lovely face when seen in the light of such incredible faith and dignity.
Mother of sorrows, I thought that night as I watched her sleep, exhausted after the trials of her admission process and the telling of her life's history. Yet I knew she wouldn't accept that label, as surely as I knew that I would look at my own life differently from then on. I remember how she thanked me several times for the good care I was giving her, but it was she who gave me what I desperately needed at that particular moment in time.
This is why I've always loved working with the elderly. They have so much to teach us, so much wisdom to share, if we will only take the time to listen before they are all gone.
