Thread by @WesElyMD

1/🧵 I lost a women into the clutches of death recently who reminded me of 2 other amazing women. Let me tell you about them…

My recent pt & Sarah both had hopes of raising their children, but it wasn’t to be so… (these stories are shared w perm)

https://twitter.com/ScribnerBooks/status/1424845442442010633

2/ Sarah was a young woman who had just had a baby and was suffering from a disease of the 💔that happens after pregnancy. Here is my first paragraph about her from #EveryDeepDrawnBreath…

3/
“In my third year of medical school, my first patient was Sarah Bollich. Sarah had grown up in a clapboard shotgun house on Desire Street in the Ninth Ward in East New Orleans. She was twenty-three years old with a one-week-old baby…

4/ and should have been at home bonding with her newborn child. Instead, she huddled in a brown blanket in the large open-ward intensive care unit in profound shock. Sarah was sick with peripartum cardiomyopathy, a rare and deadly disease of the heart…

5/ that occurs in a small number of pregnant or postpartum women. When I first met Sarah, she looked at me, her eyes full of fear, as if she were praying for help but couldn’t get the words out. She was terrified she was going to die. We were the same age…

6/ She was so young and healthy, with her whole life ahead of her. She’d grown up watching tankers and paddleboats go down the Mississippi River, wondering where they were heading and if she’d ever travel there, too.”

7/ My recent pt also had a 2nd problem called HLH. It’s a strange disease that afflicted Shonda. Here is a piece of what I wrote about Shonda in Chapter 12. I remember holding her hands and caring for her like it was yesterday…

8/
“Shonda was a young woman with a huge personality. When I met her, she was in her early twenties, and her extraordinary charisma made it seem as if she were already in the exam room when she was still in the waiting area…

9/ Unfortunately, she came to me with hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH), an autoimmune disease in which damaged blood cells start to pack the liver, spleen, and even the brain. After taking samples from her hip, we found that her bone marrow was eating itself,

10/ which meant that, even with plans for chemotherapy, she and I were on a near-certain path toward her death. Shonda beamed at me excitedly, saying, “I’m a fighter! Everyone knows it.”

11/ My recent immensely beautiful patient (& I’m referring to her character) reminded me of both Sarah and Shonda, all 3 now gone into that good night.

I’m processing all of this, and I can best sum my thoughts on all 3 women using the closing paragraph I wrote about Shonda:

12/
“Two hours after she had taken her last breath, I was walking by Shonda’s room on my way through the busy ICU, where so many lives still hung in the balance. I felt drawn inside and, padding across the floor, I was struck by the silence…

13/ The machines were quiet. I peered behind the dividing curtain, expecting the room to be empty. Instead, her figure still lay there on the bed beneath a sheet. I placed a hand on her arm and looked out the large window into the waning sunlight.

14/ We were just two humans, small in the big picture. Tears of grief ran down my face & gratitude, too, for the way she taught me to hold on to the now. I thanked Shonda for the privilege of accompanying her through illness into the beautiful forever.”

15/ I just got off the phone with my recent pt’s grieving mother. I read her this entire thread and she sobbed and said, “Dr. Wes, please send it. If these 3 women can even touch 1 person to give them hope that their life matters and will always matter, that is my dream!”

16/fin
I write to bring keep their memories alive. TY @KatyButlerBooks for your endorsement.👇

Readers, join our pts across a half-century evolution of #CriticalCare toward humanism. We need YOUR help w the next steps! (All $ goes back to pts & families)

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