Tripti Nagar’s Reviews > In Shock: My Journey from Death to Recovery and the Redemptive Power of Hope > Status Update

That when we feel them, it guts us, and we hate it, so we joke or we drink or we run or we harden. And that it worried me that that was all any of us knew how to do, to joke or drink or run or harden. That I wanted to learn how we could truly be there for everyone’s hurt, but not to have ir transfer onto us like some sort of prickly, dark matter.

…or grief feels terribly selfish and entitled. That we don’t feel sorry for ourselves because we know it’s not our sadness, it sometimes just feels as if we are seeing all the sadness in the world at once, and we just need a second to breathe, but we haven’t built a mechanism to allow us to breathe, or pause, or feel all the feelings.

That trying to do good can sometimes hurt so much that you break inside and you don’t know if you can go on doing good anymore? That we see terrible, awful, bloody things and it hurts? And we don’t feel we have a right to hurt, because we are in the outer circles of the diagram and everyone around us is right in the center of it and it hurts so much more for them. So feeling anything that resembles sadness…

He was our levity and our gravity, lightening our burden while simultaneously firmly anchoring us to the earth and to each other

There was heartbreak and mountains of guilt and the desperate wish for some mechanism, any mechanism, to augment our resilience. As a physician, I understood how perilously close we always were to failing someone. Even when we intended to do no harm, it seemed, we lacked the necessary tools to heal without layering in some added suffering

The intensity of my focus on medicine was such that I felt fortunate to have a learning opportunity, to personally engage with the path of physiology I studied for so long. I knew I was dying, and I was still struck by the science of my decline

The trouble with not having a safe space within medicine is that for those outside medicine, our stories are almost too much to bear. I tried to download my day, in an effort to find solace, but inevitably my sounding board would get caught up in the details of the story. If I found an event was terrible enough that I needed to debrief, it was too awful for anyone to see past the drama to my emotions and needs.

I believed that one I was a doctor again, I could save my patients through sheer force of attention. I promised myself I wouldn’t miss any clues or bypass any opportunity to help them inch toward recovery. I had never considered what it might feel like to try that hard, care that much, and still lose.

It seemed to me a tremendous imbalance, to have spent all those years focused on the acquisition of information without also having cultivated sufficient space for empathy

I began to think the timing of my illness was more appropriate than I could have possibly known. As much as I had always believed my training would be completed by some date that could be anticipated on a calendar, I clearly wasn’t done. I hadn’t seen all that I had needed to see in terms of suffering, identity and illness.