This is your Grandad
Anonymous
Prose
I walk into the room and see ‘it’ lying there, “no”, I tell myself, “it’s him, this is your Grandad”. I stand there looking at him, my brother has never seen a dead person before, and he is understandably tentative and is crying.
Crying is not the first thing that is on my mind however; I find myself comparing him to the bodies we see each week in the dissection room. He is clothed and hasn’t had his hair shaved off, nor is he as flat as the cadavers we see. However an old, dead, man now reminds me of the dissection room.
When I go forward and touch him I think that it’ll be possible to unflap the layers of him; skin, fascia, muscle etc just like we can in the D.R. So now five minutes must have passed and this is what my mind has been occupied with. I know people grieve in different ways but surely this is not one of them? I should be saying my personal goodbyes, thanking him for the wisdom he imparted on me, telling him I’ll take care of Grandma. This is what I would have been doing last year I imagine, but since coming to medical school it has changed.
As a coping mechanism in the D.R. you can’t spend the session thinking about the life this cadaver once had, that they once laughed, felt pain, loved, it would make it too hard. Therefore one tries to respectfully detach oneself. However this detachment seems to have encroached into my personal life. It’s going to be difficult not to get too involved with patients, but then still retain the same compassion for friends and family when they get ill. How will I do this? I suppose I will just learn with time, and ask for advice from doctors.
When I sit down in the church for the funeral service I feel guilty that I haven’t properly respected my Granddad, that when I saw him I just saw a bunch of tissues, not the person he once was. This however is what the D.R. has taught me, yes the structures of the body are amazing, but they are merely cells arranged beautifully to produce life.
I’m a little concerned that medicine will start affecting my personal life more and more like this; for example I’ve heard stories of men giving their partners breast examinations during foreplay out of habit! My hope though is that because I’m thinking about these matters already I should be able to learn to deal with these issues. However I also realise that choosing a profession such as Medicine means that some of my personal life will be affected, and this is a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
I suppose a metaphor for this would be a re-sealable bag. It can be open or closed. However each time it goes from being sealed to not sealed to being sealed again it loses some of its ‘stickiness’; just as it becomes difficult to re-attach yourself when you spend so much time detached.
Crying is not the first thing that is on my mind however; I find myself comparing him to the bodies we see each week in the dissection room. He is clothed and hasn’t had his hair shaved off, nor is he as flat as the cadavers we see. However an old, dead, man now reminds me of the dissection room.
When I go forward and touch him I think that it’ll be possible to unflap the layers of him; skin, fascia, muscle etc just like we can in the D.R. So now five minutes must have passed and this is what my mind has been occupied with. I know people grieve in different ways but surely this is not one of them? I should be saying my personal goodbyes, thanking him for the wisdom he imparted on me, telling him I’ll take care of Grandma. This is what I would have been doing last year I imagine, but since coming to medical school it has changed.
As a coping mechanism in the D.R. you can’t spend the session thinking about the life this cadaver once had, that they once laughed, felt pain, loved, it would make it too hard. Therefore one tries to respectfully detach oneself. However this detachment seems to have encroached into my personal life. It’s going to be difficult not to get too involved with patients, but then still retain the same compassion for friends and family when they get ill. How will I do this? I suppose I will just learn with time, and ask for advice from doctors.
When I sit down in the church for the funeral service I feel guilty that I haven’t properly respected my Granddad, that when I saw him I just saw a bunch of tissues, not the person he once was. This however is what the D.R. has taught me, yes the structures of the body are amazing, but they are merely cells arranged beautifully to produce life.
I’m a little concerned that medicine will start affecting my personal life more and more like this; for example I’ve heard stories of men giving their partners breast examinations during foreplay out of habit! My hope though is that because I’m thinking about these matters already I should be able to learn to deal with these issues. However I also realise that choosing a profession such as Medicine means that some of my personal life will be affected, and this is a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
I suppose a metaphor for this would be a re-sealable bag. It can be open or closed. However each time it goes from being sealed to not sealed to being sealed again it loses some of its ‘stickiness’; just as it becomes difficult to re-attach yourself when you spend so much time detached.
Whole Person Care, Year One
This prose summed up perfectly what it feels like to be a medical student trying to make sense of what you see and how to feel when you first start. Relating the bodies in the dissection room to that of loved ones is something that I personally struggled with initially but the writer embodies this feeling of detachment and emotion coming together. The blurred lines of personal life and medical life are compared to a plastic bag, this metaphor fits perfectly to how many people feel with the detachment becoming harder and harder over time. This piece made me feel more content that my feelings are normal and that there are others that can relate.