43

“Morgan, will you please hold the phone for him?” the nurse asked me. I quickly took her place and held a clunky white hospital phone up to a middle-aged man’s bloody ear. A ground level fall patient, he had been brought in half an hour earlier after being found collapsed outside of a local Petco where he worked. I stood there, trying to hold the phone to his ear, though he was in a neck collar. I quietly listened to him comfort his wife, telling her that he was fine and to go back to sleep, that she could come in later that morning after she had rested, rather than make the 20 minute drive to the hospital at 3:30 in the morning. After listening to them exchange “I love you’s,” I hung up the phone and finished assisting the nurse drawing blood and running iStats.

An hour later, he was intubated, cathed and sedated awaiting his bed in the ICU. His CT scan had shown a massive brain bleed and no one, including neurosurgery, was hopeful he would wake up. I listened to the nurses and doctors refer to him as 43, his bed number, while I tried to wrap my head around the fact that I had witnessed the last moments of his conscious life. I had held the phone the last time he told his wife he loved her. I had awkwardly patted his shoulder and mumbled reassurances while he unknowingly tried to fight the restraints holding him to the bed. And now he would go up to the ICU, sedated with a plastic tube down his throat, while his wife and son were on their way to say goodbye in a cold and sterile room.

When you work a 12 hour shift, inevitably all the hours begin to run together until nothing in particular sticks out. But patient 43 stuck with me. Maybe it was the randomly tragic nature of the situation or maybe it was something in the way he told his wife he loved her. By the time I returned to the hospital later that week I was still thinking about 43 and how his life had ended so abruptly. Mid shift, on my way back from the lab I heard a familiar voice. “Morgan!” I turned around to see patient 43’s nurse form the shift before. We briefly exchanged “how are you’s” and I asked her if she had any interesting patients. As I turned to walk away she called back, “Hey remember the patient from last week with the bad brain bleed?” I felt my stomach start to sink a little. Here it comes. She went on, “He got better and went home on Thursday.” “Seriously?” I replied, stunned. “Yep.” We both started walking away when she jokingly called back over her shoulder, “Hey, sometimes miracles happen.”

And I know she was joking. But whenever I walk by room 43 I can’t help but think of someone who got better. Someone who went home. And someone who I will always remember as the first miracle I witnessed in medicine.