What Patients Taught Me by Audrey Young

Author:Audrey Young [Young, Audrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-57061-658-7
Publisher: Sasquatch Books
Published: 2009-09-28T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Missoula

Missoula existed as a kind of fable in my mind. I had known the place briefly, from stories told in bars between dart games and pitchers of beer, from excursions into steep western Montana forests and Norman Maclean stories filtered through slack moments at night before my plunge into sleep. I nourished dreams of luminous mountains, thrashing summer storms, chanterelles growing in the cool damp shade of fallen timber.

Patients’ lives bled into my daydreaming. People arrived in Seattle from Montana towns named Ajax and Deer Lodge and Wolf Creek, half-alive and propelled by an almost unbearable instinct to keep going. For a month I took care of a middle-aged man named Billy Wayne Packer who was crushed between an eighteen-wheeler and his own pickup truck while he was patching a flat tire. Somehow he extricated himself from between the vehicles, crawled into the cab of his pickup truck, and drove fifteen miles down a dirt road to the hospital in Livinston.

“I was so thirsty. Really, really thirsty. I just had to keep going, because I knew I was going to die,” he said.

He forgot everything after the hazy bumpy drive. The chart notes from Livingston report he bled rapidly into his gut, his blood pressure low and skittery. A surgeon in Bozeman opened his belly, carved out the hemorrhaging pieces, shipped the living remnants of him by helicopter airlift to Seattle in the middle of the night. Packer awoke in intensive care with just four feet of digestive tract left inside. When he finally left intensive care for the surgical floor three weeks after the accident, I often found him gazing out the tall windows, looking between the high-rises downtown to the blue water and faint mountains beyond. Intravenous nutrition flowed into his veins from a two-gallon bag hanging above him. He could barely stand on legs weak from his lengthy intensive care stay. I lingered as he talked about a newly built cabin twenty miles down a gravel road, squeezed into a rocky cranny, without running water or electricity. He couldn’t wait to get back home. Just him and the new wife. So much setting up to do. The hungry dogs.

On the morning he was finally headed back to Montana, the senior resident said wistfully, “Back to God’s country,” and Billy Wayne Packer smiled a distant, faraway look. It went to the place inside me where my love for the Montana land lived, where the long forever and ever of Montana highways raced between authoritative mountainsides, a flat stillwater river cut a dark swath through stands of centuries-old evergreens, and something broke open inside. You never knew of land this beautiful.

I wrapped myself in this Montana daydream while I returned to the Seattle wards for a month-long stint on an internal medicine service at the veterans hospital. After Christmas vacation I put my white coat back on and found that patients now thought of me as their primary doctor. Suddenly I had my hands in every stage of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.