Perspective

The young mother says she is sick. And my husband does an exam. He will tell her she has cancer. He will sit across from her and answer questions patiently and watch as she weeps and her family sits with wide open eyes around her. 

Once home, I say: "Can you wipe the table for me?" and he takes the rag and cleans the table. He stands by calmly as I race around the kitchen, flustered at crumbs and spilled juice, fretting over the inconsequential simpleness of raising our children. 

My daughter jumps onto his back, and he slides her around onto his hip and nuzzles her neck with his a beard that has seen fourteen hours in the hospital. I watch him look at her, and can see a gratitude seeping out from behind bloodshot eyes.

Only later, when the kids are nestled into their beds, and we are lying next to each other in our room, will he tell me about the child abuse case he had witnessed that day. About the anger that he had to wrestle down while the abusive man stood by the bedside coaching a little girl on words she did not believe. 

I probe. He resists. Or he spills every painful and funny and happy and terrifying moment. Sometimes the words will spill out. Other times he will tuck them away. He tucks because he is tired. Because the stories are too long or too painful or too difficult to put into layman's terms. Sometimes he starts but can see that the reality of what he has had to do that day is too much for me and he files the story into some safe place inside of him.  

Yesterday there was a prison inmate that needed to be searched for hidden drugs. (I don't even ask where they may have hidden them. I have learned what "searched" means after years of his work in the emergency room.)

Covid is spoken a few times. A patient who might have it. A patient who definitely has it. The time he wasn't sure if he had the space for the patient. A few who are so sick they must be admitted -- their pulse ox dangerously low as their body hunkers down for a war. 

And while he gowns up and gowns down and gowns up and gowns down throughout the whole day, I do ... normal life. And now, I lay in bed next to him, and I try to picture what he has faced that day. 

Past stories come racing through my mind. Many stories of drugs. Meth-use causes people to think their skin has bugs on them. So patients bring in ziplock bags full of these bugs. When my doctor husband explains to them that their paranoia is because of the drug they are taking, they either don't believe him or nod, frustrated because they know they won't stop the drugs and the paranoia will continue. 

The bag of "bugs" is not bugs. Only skin. And he listens to their stories of tapeworms and creatures that seep through their skin as they pick at sores on their body that they believe are caused by something other than the poison they are pouring into themselves. 

I picture the glass to one of their psychiatric holding rooms. Someone tried to put their head through it last week and my husband showed me a picture later. He seems casual about it. No big deal. But I remember past times when there have been threats with weapons and fears that someone will come in shooting because they are frustrated with a wait-time or angry at someone sitting in one of the rooms. 

Before this virus kept me from visiting the ER with my children, we'd come in to say hello sometimes. But only when things weren't crazy. And by crazy it might mean a person who doesn't want to wear her clothes. Or a couple in the midst of a domestic dispute. Or an exam on a child who is the victim of a rape. 

It might even be something simple. Something sweet. A little girl who needs her fingers stitched extra carefully because she has a piano recital next week. Or a mother worried that she's in early labor only to see that all is well, and she can go home and wait for her baby to come when he is supposed to come. 

There will be people he saves. Children he loses. And a very sad room where he will meet with loved ones to tell them that someone very special has left this earth. The responses may be subdued. Hysterical. Question-ridden. Or it may be a simple: "I knew I'd eventually get this call," when a parent of a drug-abuser hears that their son has lost his battle with addiction. 

And he'll leave the room to go to another where someone is angry that they waited so long or terrified of their own diagnosis. 

And when he walks into our home on our farm at the end of his overnight shift, I often mumble a: "How did it go?" before launching into my own soliloquy of the throw-up a dog left as a surprise or the chicken that died or the sheep paddock I set up or some eggs I sold or a homeschool stand-off over math problems. I fret over a cereal bowl that they didn't put in the dishwasher ... again. 

Why do I wonder how he can be such a patient parent? Of course he can. Perspective is a beautiful gift. 

He listens so patiently to my ridiculous ramblings. And yet he must be so wanting to give me my own dose of perspective. He has seen perspective. He sees it everyday. He stands by the bedside of a patriarch while dozens of grandchildren sweep by his bedside mumbling their last thankful words. He says: "Time of death ..." as he turns to face the waiting family watching through a window.

He is watching sin and sickness and the absolute most terrifying and sad moments of a person's life and coming home to bird with his son or sit and discuss Legos with another. They climb onto his lap to read Lord of the Rings and he lays with them in their beds and pretends that the world is nothing but a happy place. 

We discuss the trivial. He wants the trivial. And yet the trivial is so ... trivial. 

He is my hero. I so seldom tell him. And I often forget. This virus has simply reminded me of what I know he is. He is a kind and loving human being that happened to be blessed with a very intelligent and compassionate mind. And he is given the great honor of sitting with people during the most vulnerable moments of their lives.

And I'm given the great honor of having him sit with me during my hardest trivial moments as well.

I'm so glad there are people like him. People like his nurses. Like his techs. Like every person who is living through Emergency Medicine. Not only during Covid. 

But always. 

Thank you husband for caring for us. And for everyone else in our community. 

I love you.