The Two Kinds of Decay

The Internship

When I was sixteen, I was a volunteer intern at the local hospital.

I was given a white coat and a clipboard and accompanied the medical students on their clinical rounds.

I scrubbed in and watched vascular and orthopedic surgeries not knowing that in the future I’d have both kinds.

For several weeks in the pathology labs, I made slides from tissue samples suspended in wax.

One day a doctor and I visited a patient who was deeply asleep. She was an old woman, and her name was Anna.

I held Anna in my arms as the doctor listened for her breaths through a stethoscope held to her back. She wasn’t cold or waxy or lying in a pile of excrescence, so we spent a long time trying to find a pulse. She looked no older or frailer or sleepier than many of the other elderly patients.

When we were sure Anna had died, the respiratory specialist recorded the time as her time of death. Then the respiratory specialist and I went back to his office, and he told me it was all right to feel disturbed or upset by what had happened.

I didn’t feel upset, but I thought I should, so I stared at the wall and tried to look solemn.

The respiratory specialist said I could sit in his office for the rest of the afternoon with a couple of interns who were doing his paperwork. And so all afternoon I sat and stared at the wall and looked solemn, and periodically one of the interns would ask me if I felt all right, and I would say, solemnly, Yes.

One night, five years later, in the same hospital, a woman came into my room to take blood. But it wasn’t one of the phlebotomists. It was Louise, from the pathology lab, where I’d made slides from all those tissue samples all those years before!

I told her I’d been an intern in 1990, and that I’d liked working with her. She said she remembered me.