And there's a hand my trusty friend!
And give us a hand o' thine!
And we'll take a right good-will draught,
for auld lang syne.
-Robert Burns
It was the very last night of a difficult two-month rotation early in my residency back in the 1980s. On call. Over 100 hours per week. Exhausted. Burned out. Going-through-the-motions. Not having a good time.
I was sitting at the intensive care unit console writing notes in the charts of two of the patients I was following. If they made it until 7:00 a.m., I would pass them to the next resident on call.
One young woman had taken a fistful of pills and then hanged herself. Her beleaguered family had tried very hard to help her over the years and now they were spending their holidays in the hospital standing vigil at her bedside. As she spiral downward toward brain death, the family hoped she might bring light to someone else’s life with an organ donation. My task was to keep her alive long enough for her body to clear the toxic levels of the medications she had ingested. I flipped through her chart and wrote my note. Family members walked numbly past me.
In another bed was a young mother who had been getting ready to go out for a New Year’s Eve dinner party. Her husband heard her collapse in the bathroom and found her unconscious. After being rushed to the hospital, the scans confirmed that she had experienced a massive soon-to-be fatal brain hemorrhage from a ruptured aneurysm. She was completely unresponsive. The family, dressed for an evening out, sat disconsolately at her bedside. I dutifully recorded my findings in her chart.
As I sat writing, music was playing on a nearby radio. I looked up when I recognized Dan Fogelberg's voice. I had never known the lyrics for this song, but it is a first-person account of the narrator running into an old friend.
We drank a toast to innocence
We drank a toast to now
And tried to reach beyond the emptiness
But neither one knew how.
We drank a toast to innocence
We drank a toast to time
Reliving in our eloquence
Another 'auld lang syne'...
Then the strains of Auld Lang Syne filled the air. I checked my watch. It was midnight. I put down my pen and called home, wanting to talk to Kathi.
“Hi, sweetie,” I said. “Did I wake you?”
She had been dozing. “Guess so. Hi, yourself. How are things going?”
I scanned the patients in front of me. I looked at the family members moving in and out of the rooms. I looked down at the chart notes I had written. I thought for a second.
“Not well. It has been quite a day. I love you.”
“Love you, too. See you in a few hours?”
“Yeah. Can’t wait to get home. Happy New Year.”
_______
Friends,
I thought about this particular night recently only to find that I had written an essay about it back in 2009. So, here it is again. Best wishes for the new year, everyone.
-BC
