Love in the Afternoon

Start any day on Palliative Medicine, and you already know that your day is anything but that which you might otherwise predict.

Family meeting, half past nine, but no family there.

Move on to the ten o’clock family meeting, son there, not the daughter. Try to squeeze in a follow-up, only to find that that patient is down in radiology. Back to the half-past-nine, hoping against hope, in this, this our own mission of hope…

Our days, our agendas, we all know, are fluid.

We start with lists of patients. We plan to see most in some timely manner. And then…

Lovely woman, 58 years old. Her husband at the bedside.

She had come in with pain, pain in her fingertips, with, studies confirm, micro-embolisms in those fingertips.

Only ten days earlier, however, she had learned of her Stage IV lung cancer, she still absorbing that.

Radiation not an option. Chemo still out there, waiting, waiting for the oncologist to call the score.

“They give me a year,” she tells me and tells the nurse with me. “And that, that, they say, is generous,” tears starting.

Her husband, now and all this time, stoic, even as we continue to talk, talk about those things no one wants to talk about. His chin, once or twice in all that time trembling, the weight of her future, theirs, all at once nothing but that, a weight.

And then from nowhere…

“I do love you,” she tells him, her eyes, her eyes brimming with tears. “I just never told you.”

All at once, his eyes turning to hers.

Hers to his.

His surprised.

Decades married. Two adult children.

And love.

Love this very afternoon, a surprise.