just

sometimes we don't know why life leads us down certain paths.  sometimes we end up doing things or having done things and we're not sure what they were for.

here i am in africa.

before we moved i was doing palliative care.  i had studied it, i was teaching it, i was about to be board certified in it.  i had one chance to return to the US and take the exams for that certification, but because i was here, and doing more internal medicine than palliative care, i couldn't return and take the board test.  i missed it.  and i began to wonder what those years were for?  we in medicine, are so used to working toward a goal, toward advancement.  but i let it go.  i figured that God's plan for my life had shifted, now i'm in africa practicing medicine and even a lot of pediatrics, and while i won't be able to officially practice palliative care with out a fellowship in the US, i loved learning it and teaching it and mostly i loved the privilege of caring for those people at the end of their lives.

but now, i think i may have studied and practiced palliative care, just so i could come to africa and care for timothy. just so i could know how to correctly dose adjust morphine and manage bone pain and how to sit with someone who is scared and crying and afraid that pain means worsening disease and all the crap that stirs up internally.  just so i could remember that popcorns and movies and sweets and bikes and football, and talking about normal stuff in between pain scores and bathroom habit conversations, are life changing.  just so i could be less afraid of crying with someone.  just so i could hold their hand and be quiet.  just so that i could wait and be there and not give up.  just so that i could do my best to relieve suffering even, even when i can't fix it.

we in medicine, like to fix it.  broken things bother us.  illness is supposed to be cured, death is failure.  but learning to be with non-fixable things is essential in medicine and in life, because broken is part of living.  broken is everywhere.  broken is in us.  unlearning this as a failure, is key to caring for each other. whether it's death or pain or divorce or anything that causes suffering, reaching into our own brokenness, looking at our own pain, unites us.  it's not pretty, but it's true.  when you peel back the layers of the onion of each of our lives, it's all pretty much the same.

so we should be slow to judge, and slow to avoid, and quick to comfort, and quick to embrace. we should cloak one another, we should shelter each other, forgive each other, accept broken and practice gentle mending.

here we all are, where ever we are. i am here and i have the opportunity to care directly for someone medically, socially, and spiritually in ways i've been trained in and i'm so thankful for that.

but everyone, in every place has opportunity to reach out and mend and patch and hold. we just do what we can do. we just do our best- even and especially when we know we can't fix it.