I Have a Gift for You

After seven years of college, I finally made it to my long anticipated milestone of my last year of pharmacy school and am blessed to be able to spend this entire year on rotations - experiencing a different pharmacy setting every five weeks with the beautiful goal of simply learning all that I can. This means that I’ll be spending a lot of time working in hospitals. After officially completing my very first week of my first hospital experience, I’m mentally and physically exhausted, but happy to report that I have already learned more than I ever thought possible in such a short period of time. And what’s wonderful about my learning is that it extends into matters much deeper than the chemistry of medications and straight into matters involving the chemistry of the heart. I’d like to share with you a simple experience that melted my heart today.

My mornings this week have been spent discussing patient charts with staff doctors and medical residents in the ICU and cardiology units, a task that left me feeling drained and cold. Cold in the sense that in the presence of so much medical intelligence, patients became defined by the diseases that afflicted them. They became cases – problems – that could be fixed with a simple medication dose or diagnostic test.  Conversation was so serious, so full of medical jargon, and so empty of emotions. It was medicine as science and it lacked faith and hope.

 

So this morning, after a week of this, I was with my team of doctors, halfway through the list of patients. We were leaving the ICU on the way to the cardiology unit, and I was walking a few steps behind the rest of the doctors, completely lost in my own tired thoughts and feeling dark and emptied by the discussions. Lost that is until this sweet elderly man walked right up to me, nudged me on the shoulder and said, “Hi sweetheart. Open up your hand. I have a gift for you.” He smiled the warmest, happiest smile I’d seen all week. I was so shocked by him that I just turned and wordlessly looked at him for a few seconds. Finally, without the slightest hint of a fading smile, he gently touched my elbow and motioned again for my hand. I responded this time and held my hand under his in a timid cupping shape. He promptly dropped two Hershey’s kisses into my cautious hand and cheerfully, without prompting, introduced himself as a deacon from a local Catholic Church. He gleefully told me he volunteers at the hospital and had come to visit the new patients. I slowly let this sink in while I stared down at the beautifully simple gift in my hand.

This man then walked with me up two flights of stairs. He excitedly told me he had just turned 86 years old and explained how grateful he was for his own wonderful health. His smile never faltered, even when my supervising doctor turned around to give me a, “Hurry up, student, we’re wasting time here” kind of face.

This whole interaction probably lasted no more than five minutes, but it changed my entire day. Two minutes after leaving this sweet man’s side, I was standing in my medical circle again and discussing an unruly patient. One of the doctors said in reference to the patient, “Well they say that some people bring happiness with them everyone they go and others bring happiness only when they leave.” Everyone around me chuckled a little, but I just looked down the hallway at my sweet elderly friend and thought about how much happiness that man carried.

 

What a huge blessing that man was! I had prayed this morning before leaving for the hospital that I would be able to find joy in my learning and that I would be able to maintain a spirit of hope amid the “cold” conversations. This man, in simply carrying happiness, will probably never know that he was the answer to my prayer. I marvel at how simple the lesson was and how wonderful and personal that he sought me out of that entire group of doctors  and didn’t just pass me in the hall like he had with so many others. And I marvel that my messenger was a man of faith.

 

Please don’t let me lead you to believe that all doctors are heartless people or that medicine is an emotionless science. That’s not true at all, and I know many doctors who are both brilliant and beautiful medically and spiritually. But in medicine, just like in our day-to-day lives, we can get caught up in the details, in the to-do lists, in the routine, and in the hustle and bustle of a time-pressed world. We can forget the happiness that comes from listening to the answers found in our hearts and in our prayers rather than those found in textbooks or worldly norms. We can forget to be grateful and to hope and to share that hope. And we can forget that happiness takes root in the heart, nourished by hope and faith in a God who can make whole and heal what even science cannot. My prayer for tonight and tomorrow is that I and you can and will nourish our own roots of happiness with faith so that we, too, may bring happiness with us wherever we go.