Cycles, the marvelous and the tragic

Well, she's a week old and it certainly is marvelous and amazing, and I haven't even spent enough time with her.  Her mother, my daughter, seems to be taking to her new role very well. Both she and the father seem really pleased to be parents and are smoothly shifting the focus of their now radically different lives,  are feeling the rewards of doing that.  The baby herself, whose identity I will protect to keep her from being hounded by the millions who are following this, is doing a very good job of being a week old.  She is already living up to her billing as beautiful, brilliant and creative. What else is a grandfather to think.

She certainly knows how to snuggle right in there and sleep off those heavy feedings.

Every birth seems to innately bring forth hope that there is a bright future, and that we will all do what we can to make the world happy and safe for this child and that she carry on with enthusiasm.

However, and when you reach my stage of life you know there is always a however, during these last two weeks at work I have been overwhelmed with stories of sickness and death.  By now you are well aware that i always deal with aggravation, stress, loss, conflict, loneliness, just plain old craziness, but recently there seems to be more severe illness and death than I was prepared for. Perhaps the contrast has made me feel it so intensely.

Two of my patients have just completed weeks of caring for their dying brothers, both of whom were in their fifties.  One of these patients buried her brother and the next week was told that her husband had lung cancer. 

It may be because of my age, and that many of my patients tend to be older now too, but so many of them have parents who are crumbling or dying or dead.  This process is never clear or easy.  The care that is necessary, the expense, and what is most difficult is the decisions that have to be made.  Usually, there are no good choices.  How to let people die, what to treat, when to stop, who decides, and based on what.  With all of the new possible treatments the lines get very blurry.

These are difficulties that everyone deals with, and there is really so little I can do to help.  I help people sort out their feelings, especially if their relationships with these people were not smooth, but endings are always difficult and always bad. If it is sudden people are shocked, and when it is drawn out then people are exhausted and horrified.

In addition, I have recently gotten three new patients who have come to talk about suicides in their families.  And then the Sheriff of our county was accused of corruption and responded to the charges by locking himself in a hotel room and blowing his brains out.  All of my depressed patients reacted to that.

Also, so many people seem to be related to people with the terrible, chronic, fatal diseases: Parkinson's. ALS, MS, cirrhosis or some of the more insidious forms of cancer.  I sit and wonder when it will descend on me.  I wonder about the pain in my stomach, until I realize that I haven't eaten lunch.  I worry about my prostate as I run to the bathroom, but I can still see that it is related to how much coffee I have that morning.  Why am I so tired? Why did I drop my pen twice today?

That's why it is great to feel with warmth of a new little snuggle-bunny, with fat, smooth cheeks, who has a hundred healthy years in front of her to enjoy whatever life brings.  It is better to live with hope and enthusiasm than to be scared of losing it.  Even if it means denying reality for a while.