In Shock: My Journey from Death to Recovery and the Redemptive Power of Hope

by Rana Awdish

“Can you show me where you see that?” I realized the resident’s perspective in that moment was aligned squarely on himself. I imagined an alternate reality in which I would reach up from the gurney to trace my index finger around the outline of her perfectly elliptical, and utterly motionless, heart, delineating the anatomy the way he requested. The insensitivity of what he was asking struck me hard. I felt invisible to him.

In medicine, we are ill-equipped to continue to plan when someone tells us, “We’re praying for a miracle.”

Why was everyone’s first assumption that I was a closet addict? The easy answer is because that was their construct. They were biased in the direction of that belief. They perceived patients who asked for “extra” pain control negatively as a group relative to other groups of patients.