My morning clinic had been hectic but not very interesting. I felt bad for the student who had been assigned to me – we had not seen any unusual cardiac pathology. Instead, we had heard a long litany by a patient with a recent heart attack who for the life of him could not stop smoking, and been forced to listen to a tirade by an anxious wife who was unhappy with her husband’s nursing home and wanted to take him home for end-of-life care. A large part of that visit had consisted of calming the wife, and hunting down a new oxygen canister to replace the empty one that the nursing home had forgotten to check on when they sent the patient on his way to my appointment.
I sure hoped the next case would offer something more exciting for the student. It was a new consult, an elderly man, wheeled into the office by his wife. When I asked him if he could get out of the wheelchair, he easily acquiesced though I could tell his wife was uneasy. She didn’t say anything, though – it seemed that this was the custom, defer to the husband. He tried to flop onto the exam table, steadying himself with the cane – and almost fell. The student jumped to catch him, eagerly – he was a freshman, in the beginning of his first year, and had not seen a real patient until that day, so to him, catching a patient from a fall was new. The patient grumbled that he was ok, and the wife rolled her eyes.
As we talked further, I couldn’t quite figure out why this patient had been sent to a cardiologist – he had some nonspecific complaints that I could not entirely make sense of, either because he was a bad historian by nature, or had become one after his stroke. His wife tried to supplement the history but due to her language barrier and her general reluctance to take the center stage in the storytelling she was not much help either. In the end, I decided that an objective cardiac test would help alleviate everyone’s concerns, and ordered it. I then spent another half of the visit going over heart-healthy lifestyle, and addressing other, not-heart-related safety and preventive issues that I thought were important for him, such as walking safely, getting physical therapy and doing regular exercises to prevent falling.
After the visit, I helped to wheel the patient back to the waiting room, and saw a little girl jump up from the chair and run over to take the wheelchair away from me. “Our grand-daughter”, the wife said. Oh.
I turned toward the girl: “How old are you?” She proudly extended all the fingers on one hand: “Five!” Somewhat surprised that the little girl had been left all alone in the waiting room, I nevertheless tried to make some conversation.
“So,” I offered somewhat lamely and predictably, “what do you want to be when you grow up?”
“A cop!” came a self-assured and unhesitating response.
The girl then looked at me, pondering, her brunette curly mop shaking, gold earrings glittering, and then offered somewhat less confidently, “And a doctor.” After a moment, the curls bounced again. “Yes, a cop, AND a doctor”.
I smiled. The student laughed. We said our good-byes to the patient and his wife and returned to the exam room to finish the paperwork.
As I stood at the desk, however, I found my attention wandering. I saw other little girls in my mind – myself at age five, uncertain and shy, my little niece at the same age, more confident in what she wants but not sure yet of her place in life. My feet took me back to the waiting room.
“Here,” I offered the ears of my stethoscope to the little girl who was still guiding her grandfather’s wheelchair, “Do you want to hear what your heart sounds like?”
“YESSS!” the enthusiastic reply came quickly.
“Ok, here is your heart – ‘tick-tock, tick-tock’ … and here are your lungs, ‘whoosh-whoosh’ – can you hear it?”
The curls bobbed up and down again as the girl turned to her grandmother, spell-bound: “That was my heart! Gramma, I could hear my heart!”
After I had retrieved my stethoscope from the small hands, the student and I parted the second time and went back to the exam room. While I was trying to make some teaching points about the case, the excited squeals were still very audible from the waiting room, “The doctor! My heart! It went tock-tock! I could hear it!”
The student laughed again. “And just like that, you changed this girl’s career trajectory for life,” he offered, jokingly.
Well. Probably not. But who knows? One chance is all it takes sometimes.
Maybe the little girl will become a doctor. Maybe the man with a heart attack will stop smoking. Maybe the wife of the seriously ill patient will be less distraught, knowing she can call on my help. Maybe the elderly man will not fall at home.
Maybe.
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I never got the name of the little girl. I don’t remember the name of her grandfather. By next week, I will not remember the name of the first-year student who spent the day observing my clinic. They will likely not remember my name. I got this one chance with all of them.
One chance. Every day, filled with one-time chances.
That is a lot of maybes.
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Self-care tip: Watch for one-time chances in your everyday life. It may make a change – albeit small – in your life or in someone else’s.
Question: Do you recall a time when you took a one-time chance, or missed one? Tell us your story.
