V.

I have on my desk a photo of the daugh­ters (7, 12) of the 29 year old woman who I ordered the fatal dose of mor­phine for when the pain of her colon can­cer rode up on her like the wild horses in East­ern Ore­gon and never left. The kids are smil­ing, their arms draped over my the shoul­ders of my white coat, it is years after and they came by to say thank you. I am smil­ing in the photo also. Time and the process of re-knitting their lives is slowly putting them back together.

I have on my desk the pho­to­graph of the woman who is now an EMT. When I met her she had been shot in the chest by her hus­band. I was a chief res­i­dent and my pro­fes­sor was Dr. Davis, a crusty, cyn­i­cal trauma sur­geon who I loved for his com­pas­sion. We took her entire right lung out. Doing this in a young per­son is usu­ally fatal because all the blood that returns to the heart has to go to the lungs for oxy­gen and then back out to the body. If one lung dis­ap­pears, the other lung has to imme­di­ately com­pen­sate. It usu­ally fails. But Dr. Davis had some tricks up his sleeve. We ran her flu­ids light, kept her “dry” used diuret­ics and she sur­vived. Fif­teen years later I got a beau­ti­ful por­trait and the let­ter that said she was alive, that her ex was in prison, that she had returned to school to become and EMT like the ones who had saved her, her daugh­ter all good, and me, all those years later, tear­ing down my cheeks, lov­ing the mir­a­cle of it all. She is a woman with­out doubt, with­out hes­i­ta­tion, with all her sin­gle lung power, with her voice.