90 days

Today I saw a very interesting patient.

"You won't believe what all has happened to me in the last 90 days. In July, my wife committed suicide. I was in Arizona at the time and she was in Texas. So I moved out of our house in Texas and put my things in my folk's house in Biloxi. You can guess what happened then. I lost about 60% of it all in the hurricane. Then I found out I have renal failure and need a translplant. I'm here for a referral to a nephrologist."

Now THAT'S a bad summer.

I've learned to ask patients a lot of questions about their family, homelife, and career. It really gives me an idea about who they are and what they have to deal with.

Today a lady told me she has three children.

"Well, one is deceased." she added.

"What happened?"

"She was murdered. By her broher-in-law when she was 30. She had three kids and was trying to leave her husband. His entire family is very tight in the town she was living in, like the Little Mafia. Her brother-in-law told her she absolutely would not leave and he shot her. And to my dying day I think her husband was involved."

"Why?"

"Because he took an overdose of just the right amount of sleeping pills to put him in the hospital the day before her murder."

"Where are the children now?"

"They're with their father. He remarried and is very happy, apparently."

But the story that stays on my mind is the one a lady in her early 60s told me a few weeks back. All I asked was how many children she had.

"Three."

Pause.

"But actually one died."

"Oh, how awful."

"She was two years old. I went to take a shower while she was napping and she climbed onto the stove and turned it on. She had never ever done that and I don't know why she did it then."

This was a very soft spoken woman who worked at the local fabric store. I actually met her there and have seen her there often since she came into the office.

"Her little dress caught fire and she died in the hospital four days later."

She was crying at this point, but didn't say anything further about it.

It's a story I will never forget.