The Power of a Story

On a busy Friday night, I was paged for a consult for an 84-year-old with a right ovarian mass. RA was a lively, fashionable woman with a slight French accent. She had been in excellent health until she developed right lower quadrant pain one week ago. Her presentation and imaging were suspicious for a tubo-ovarian abscess, and RA was eventually admitted to the hospital. I lost touch with her, but one month later her name appeared on my clinic schedule. I perused her discharge summary and was stunned to realize that this woman who had previously been independent and healthy, had developed more medical problems during her hospitalization. The antibiotics to treat the abscess had led to acute renal failure and had ultimately not worked, requiring her to undergo drainage. She subsequently became so debilitated that after her 21 day stay in the hospital she was discharged to a rehab facility. When I saw her in clinic, she was wearing a hospital gown, and the brown hair that had been carefully coiffed at our initial meeting appeared limp. She had lost weight and required the aid of a wheelchair. An exam confirmed that the drainage site was healed and her abdomen was benign, but she was clearly deconditioned. She was disheartened by needing rehabilitation, but she pronounced that she had survived many things in her life and this was no different. Intrigued, I asked her where she was from; she was French but had immigrated to the US after World War II. I asked her why, and she slowly shared her story. Her family was Jewish, and when the Nazis invaded France, she was a little girl. One day, her mother sent her to the countryside for a trip, and when RA returned, she discovered that her entire family had been seized by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp. Her neighbors took her in, hiding her Jewish origins at great personal risk. When the war ended, she left the country where she had only bitter memories of her family’s death and came to the US, where one of her uncles lived. His family was poor, and RA worked hard to win a scholarship to college and another one to graduate school for her PhD, and eventually became a French professor at a prestigious university. “So you see,” she told me sadly, “I have survived many things in my life.” I was moved by her strength and courage, and we sat in silence together. I had viewed her simply as a patient, never inquiring about her life, when that was possibly the most significant insight into her as a person. This is the danger of compartmentalizing work--that the patients I see will always be just that. I had let my patients’ interlude into medical care define them. RA upended that complacency, forcing me to reevaluate each patient as a person, with a unique story and vivid life. For that, I will always be grateful.