Fade away

I felt a bit gloomy today.

One of my patients is a 22-year-old girl who was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia 2 weeks previously. Chemotherapy has been given over the past one week. Now her white cells dropped to a dangerous low. She is really vulnerable for the time being. Yet, apart from nausea, anorexia and other discomforts caused by chemo, she started to experience some emotional problems.

She wanna go home and had a quarrel with her mother, who tried to reason with her and stopped her from doing so. I went to see her in the evening ward round myself. She appeared downbeat and repeated her capricious wish of going home today.

I can't blame her too much. She used to be active and healthy and has a rosy future but now she is confined to the hospital ward, struggling with her own dear life. I can't promise her anything, either. Even though her leukemia seems responsive to chemo, she has a long way to go after this: several cycles of chemo, hair loss, loss of appetite, infections in between, stem cell transplantation, graft-versus-host disease or possibly, treatment failure. That's too much for anyone. If I were her, I might be even more fragile, even more unreasonable.

She collapsed in her father's embrace, crying like a baby. Witnessing this made my heart tender. I felt my eyes wet a bit.

Leaving her undisturbed, I walked out of the room without saying another word.