I remember that she would never eat anything. Her dad would eat her meals and set the tray just outside the room so I wouldn't wake her when I came to collect it. Her mom and sister made curtains for the hopsital room window. She had bandanas in every color to cover up her head, balding more every day from the intense chemotherapy treatments.

People die every day in that place, sometimes I even have to help prepare the bodies for the morgue. There is a certain sense of detachment that one feels when dealing with death and illness on a daily basis. You have to work in a place like that to understand. But, every once in awhile, a name catches your ear and sticks in your brain, a face appeals and it sticks in you heart. You pray that this time it will be different for her, that this time she will live. And then she doesn't and it shocks you to your very core. . .

It never makes you wonder though, why you do the job and take care of the sick people day after day. For every person who doesn't make it there are a half dozen who do and that's why you go to work and take the blood pressures and the temperatures and change the beds and bring the meals and give the baths and the hugs and the listening ear when things seem impossible.

When I read the obituary, it was the strange sense of detachement that I always feel. I have always said that what I truly feel bad about when a patient dies is that I don't feel worse. Does that make me a bad person? Or am I just doing what I can to save myself? Is it possible to care and still not let it touch you too deeply? I certainly don't have the answer. I'm not sure that I ever will.