It’s been said of life that since we’re just passing through, we should make the most of it. So it’s especially peculiar that everyday health-care professionals don’t embrace this little ditty with a stranglehold.
It’s not that “whitecoats” like me are any more astute than anyone else. It’s more we work in the everyday business of taking care of people and making them better.
From this vantage point, one quickly recognizes there are some patients you can’t make better, those who just can’t be “fixed.”
You walk out of some unfortunate patient’s room and realize your own life is pretty darn good. In the briefest of perspectives, you came to see them. Still, those inside starched white coats or the less-than-well-pressed green scrubs are like everyone else. Raising kids, running them to all their events, keeping on top of aging parents. We can forget how lucky we are to simply be healthy — but not for very long.
Bryn Cooper, our 29-year-old oncology pharmacist, was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia last year. She felt particularly exhausted after a few training runs for a local marathon event.
An exam, a few samples of blood and several hours later, Bryn’s role in this world changed from caregiver to patient — on her very own 11th floor at the University of Colorado Hospital.
This was where Bryn — an idealistic young pharmacy specialist — practiced with three other veterans of the floor, going about the business of optimizing oncology drug regimens and acting as gatekeepers for patients’ well-being and safety. Her energy, enthusiasm and approachability made her the perfect fit in a very complex medical and social environment.
From what I saw, those aspects of her character and her need to always do the best for her patients made her so universally admired it was as if she were enveloped in some sort of halo.
Given her background, training and knowledge in this field of medicine, the diagnosis could not have been easy for Bryn. There would be chemotherapy, radiation and, finally, a bone-marrow transplant.
Still, Bryn handled all of it with her characteristic dignity and, somehow, humor.
She could have dwelled on the terrible irony of her illness or even the absolutely horrendous timing of it, being newly married and all. She did not; she kept positive — I’d swear for no other reason than for the sake of all her stunned family and coworkers.
Bryn was that unselfish. If there was any way she demonstrated negativity, I never saw it in my too-few visits with her in a now very different role on 11-North. We talked about food, wine, a trading of hobbies — she’d dust off her bike do a long-distance cycling event like the MS ride with me if I’d lace up running shoes and do a half-marathon with her.
Our few little chats would end, and maybe she could get some rest before the next caregiver was in for the real business of giving medication, taking vitals, taking her for a test, performing a lumbar puncture.I’d go off on my way to the office or other patients, leaving Bryn in the solitude of what I could only hope was not her own private agony.
Once, she talked of having children. She worried so much that was not going to happen. I felt if anyone could endure what she was going through, she’d be a a great mom, and I told her that no matter what names she picked for her children I would always call them “Mini Coopers,” like those little automobiles. She liked that, and I smile thinking of just how much I’d have liked that too.
This was just not in the cards. Her last birthday was spent in one of our ICUs, but she could not make it a few days longer to Christmas, her favorite holiday.
While I’m very confident she received the best care from some of the worlds’ very best at our hospital, I will forever remain uncomfortable and frustrated that somehow, some way, we could not have done more for one of us. The world has been deprived of Bryn and the Mini Coopers that she and her husband, Scott, no doubt would have raised right.
The patients on 11-North and throughout our hospital have lost a terrific advocate, an exceptional care giver.
The sudden death of a colleague, especially to illness, strikes the whitecoats as a sucker-punch in the stomach. You tend to patients and do your very best, every once in a while thanking God it’s not you lying in that bed — then you are jolted back into the reality of how, in a single horrendous instant, it certainly could be.
Once, a long time ago, I was doing surgical-wound rounds, looking in on patients who’d undergone complex surgery in a cancer hospital and assessing their surgical sites for signs of infection.
I came to see this fragile older woman, for whom the gifted hands of a very talented surgeon could no longer make a difference.
I leaned over to assess her wound and with strength that startled me, she grabbed the lapels of my white lab coat. She practically pulled me on top of her while lifting her upper body from the bed. Our faces inches apart, she demanded of me: “Young man, you live every delicious second of your life.”
I’m certain Bryn did just that.
I try, but every now and then I lose track of life’s truly precious priorities, and why it must take that stomach-punch to place me, place us, back on course, I don’t know. We all should try a little harder and be ever grateful for those aspects of good health that we have.
Gerry Barber is a pharmacy specialist for the Pharmacy & Therapeutics Committee at the University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora. He can be reached at gerard.barber@uch.edu.
