A Very Unique Special Opportunity

I signed up to help out wit a video my Social and Behavioral Science professor was making. Well when I showed up, it turned out that he wanted me and the other two students to interview one of our course's discussion leaders, a really old physician who has had Parkinson's for a long time now and was just diagnosed last week with pancreatic cancer. He's in hospice care right now and knows that he will most likely die within a few weeks max.

After being told this, my partnerns and I had a few minutes to get together and come up with the questions we would individually ask him for the video presentation.

I decided to go last and by the time I started asking him questions, I could tell he had gotten tired and was having a hard time coming up with the answers he wanted to.

Regardless, it turned out successfully and after we spent some more time with him and his family, my classmates and I left.

I guess the whole experience just got me down. I mean I never thought about what it would feel like to be talking with someone knowing that that person knows he is soon going to pass away. It's a very unusual situation and for that reason it feels strange and even scary on an emotional level. After the interview, I was drained and well, I kinda cried a bit, and just took a long nap.

But overall, I think talking to us medical students through the tape one last time and leaving some advice for this class and the many med student classes to come after us was a good thing for him and a great thing for me and my classmates. I'm sure to a certain extent it may have made him feel good to know he could leave us with something, and we were grateful that he wanted to do this.

In the end, we turned what really is a natural yet unfortunate situation and made the best thing possible out of it and for that I guess I feel really grateful and I think overall the experience put a lot of things in perspective for me. Well, it's 11 and I better go to bed, long long day of cellular biology and biochemistry tomorrow.