The nurse practitioner exhaled completely as she plopped down next to me in the clinic workroom — as if she had used up her last bit of energy. She had spent the last hour with a 75-year-old man with severe chronic kidney disease.
what we could have done
The old woman died. I heard she slept more and more of the days away until one day she stopped talking and eating in the awake moments. Then her breathing slowed and her breaths shallowed until she stopped breathing altogether.
how it’s always been done
Some time ago, I wrote about how I, being no Denzel Washington groupie, am unaffected by my Denzel doppelgänger. I am, on the other hand, an Atul Gawande groupie and metaphorically wriggle out of my panties every time I read his work.