Although our trip made for a lot of happy moments, there were sad ones as well.
This man came to our clinic with the chief complaint of hemorrhoids. The triage staff noticed his frail appearance and brought him directly to Cole and Noami. Cole took his blood pressure and it was 80/40. I have never heard of someone's blood pressure being that low. They immediately began an IV of normal saline and continued it for about 3 hours. Upon examination, Cole diagnosed what the man thought was hemorrhoids to be rectal carcinoma. I will spare you the details of the adenocarcinoma tumor in his rectum that Cole told me about, but let's just say it was very late stage cancer. Cole grew up a few years, I believe, during this morning. It was his first experience involved with telling a patient and their family of a cancer diagnosis. Cole will most likely have the unfortunate opportunity to have this conversation a number more times in his career, and the reality of the heaviness, sadness, and desperation hit him. This cancer would kill this man, and unfortunately, kill him very soon.
We had no physical medicine or procedure to help this man. The strongest pain killers we had were ibuprofen 400mg, which even doubled and dosed three times a day isn't sufficient for a terminal cancer patient. He was dying a painful death. This is sad, but even worse is that this man, nor his family, knew about the hope of heaven. Cole and Noami were able to use one of our Christian translators to pray for this man and his family. They prayed that this man would know Jesus before he died. They prayed that his family would know the peace that only Christ gives. Cole said it was the first time he realized that he didn't have any comfort for this family. When heaven is on the other side, there can be joy in death. Sickness and pain will be gone. Our bodies will be restored. For the unbeliever though, death is real, and hell would be worse than the present excruciating state of this man.
No comments:
Post a Comment