Ms. B gently asked me if I could cut her omelet into bite-size pieces. I gingerly handled the plastic knife and sliced into the delicate hospital-made omelet. I made three expert pieces, straight-walled and contained. Bacon bits spilled out of the first one, but it was an edge piece. It’s not my fault. The other two pieces held up nicely, the glossy spinach densely packed in between the warm folds of egg. I admired my handiwork. The J.D. in me began to romanticize: maybe I was meant to be a surgeon after all. But the Dr. Cox in my mind interrupted. “Bite-size, Sami.” I looked at the plate. People don’t eat this way. Ms. B laughed as I cut the continent-sized pieces into thirds and turned her omelet into scrambled eggs, which she explicitly did not order.
The next day, she was set for discharge. Her transportation was due at 4 pm. It was 2 pm now. We had rounded earlier in the morning and finalized her paperwork, prescriptions, and orders. I wanted to catch her one more time.
Ms. B lives with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, a disease process I know little about and had not expected to encounter. Our conversations were always so pendulous. One minute she’d laugh at her circumstances. The very next, she’d abruptly start to cry. I had to remember to place the tissue box near her left hand, the only one she could move to her face. Her strength was nearly gone.
That afternoon, in between surgical cases, I paid her a visit and joined her at bedside. She asked me where I was from. Chicago. She asked me how close to the hospital I lived. Down the street and to the left. She reminisced about the neighborhood and shared a fond memory of a self-obsessed boy she had met in the early 1960s who tried to impress her by revving his pastel pink car up and down the main road. In between giggles, she told me about the obscenities she yelled at him. It was the most I had seen her laugh so far.
She asked me about my career plans, my dreams. I want to be an astronaut, always have. I want to be a surgeon, too, I reassured her and myself, I guess. She asked me why. Because of the great unknown. Because there is so much left to discover and explore.
A whole minute passed silently by. She extended her right hand, her weaker hand, and I held it. She began to cry. The great unknown. She said she was scared. Scared of how her disease would progress, scared of who would be by her side and what else she would have to lose. I told her that my heroes are people like Neil Armstrong, Ed White, Gene Kranz — pioneers of the space race, people who bravely took us deeper into the darkness. I thought of her as a pioneer, too, bravely facing the unknown and unexpected changes of her disease. That makes her my hero, too, I told her. We talked for another half hour. By the grace of God, my pager stayed silent.
Ms. B is fiercely independent. She refused multiple interventions during her hospitalization because she wanted to remain as self-dependent as she could. But she allowed me to re-bend her straws, reposition her phone and remote, cut her omelet into smaller and smaller pieces. She saw humanity in me, she said as I brought forkfuls of omelet scramble to her mouth. That’s the word she used. She was embarrassed for allowing herself to depend on someone and asked me in all seriousness not to lose my humanity. There goes that word again. I’m not sure what I said next. I was so flustered by the weight of her words that I stammered my way to silence and looked down.
She asked me to lift the head of her bed and motioned for an embrace. I thanked her for being so honest and vulnerable with me and told her I hoped to see her again just as long as it was outside of a hospital. She was back to giggling, the unknown no longer at the front of her mind.
She squeezed my hand weakly before letting go. I left the room and locked eyes with her nurse. We shook our heads, silently, knowingly, in that I-hate-ALS kind of way.