A Reflection: The Eyes I Can’t Forget
By <name>/u/Incorrect_Username_</name><uri>https://old.reddit.com/user/Incorrect_Username_</uri>
Started out in triage that day. First patient, 20-something female with complaint of "generalized abdominal pain" Joke to the nurse, "well, this could be just about anything. Let's bring her in and get clocked in for the day" Patient strides in. Overall she looks well-enough. She's young. Healthy. Physically fit. She smiles at us. She was two weeks postpartum and was convinced the pain and vomiting were just part of recovering from pregnancy. It had been a remarkable year. She had gotten married, moved here for work, and delivered her first child—a son. Vitals are stable. Exam is reassuring. No focal tenderness, distension, or rigidity. Nothing appears apparently off. Then I noticed her eyes They’re big and impossibly bright. The kind of eyes that smile at you before the rest of her face did. They were really quite striking. But then... something isn't quite right about them... are they… just the faintest wash of yellow? Only slightly, one could've believed you were imagining it. We start the workup. Labs look mostly good but sure enough the bili and LFTs are a little bumped. So we order the CT scan. As the images become available I scroll through it. Base of the lungs...hm well, that’s odd... keep scrolling... "oh no" The words leave my mouth involuntarily. My stomach drops I'm no radiologist. I didn’t need to be. Read comes back, sure enough metastatic … liver, lungs, lymph nodes... and finding of singular focus, there's a mass in the gallbladder Those big beautiful eyes stare right through me as I begin to talk. There's disbelief. Surely we're wrong. She's just sick from the pregnancy recovery, right? Her gaze slowly becomes hollow. As we talk it sets in. We're progressing through stages of grief minute by minute. There are conversations in medicine that no amount of training ever truly prepares you for. My responsibility was to tell her the truth. My hope was that I could do it without taking away every ounce of hope she still had. I used every shred of tenderne
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