Broken gods

When you were an intern you barely knew how to be a doctor. You mimicked and mimed and hoped that you would be enough. You didn't know it could be this terrifying just to introduce yourself to a patient or another day to the bereaved after you called time of death. It might have been the same day. You knew the older resident was the hero they wrote about in the news – a healthcare hero – when she showed you how to intubate a baby with vocal cords as thin as slivered almonds. Then after, she showed you where the bathroom was and didn't tell anyone she heard you crying like it had been your child. You kept imagining it could have been. You also knew this: The attendings were gods and if you made it through you might be a god too. One day, you go to work and it feels like you've always been there – always had to deal with those intoxicated hallway patients and asymptomatic hypertension and flu and the COVID that doesn't kill and the COVID that does and sepsis and GI bleeds and STEMIs and you forget sometimes that you're not supposed to speak that way, in acronyms and terms no one understands. You can't remember that you once sat for an hour with a man who could have been your father and spent all that unbilled time explaining something as easy as diabetes. You can't remember that you left that room feeling like some things mattered.