Marks

The Internet: a giant tree for people to carve their names and leave their mark in this world. Recently, a patient's spouse suggested I look up a You Tube video of her deceased husband. “You should see him before he got sick. You can see him dance a traditional Greek dance.” This was especially more poignant when I viewed the video, because throughout his length of stay he could hardly move his legs.

Whenever I google a patient's name, a sense of irrational guilt creeps up before I click “search.” It's this HIPAA business drummed into me. I feel less of a voyeur when a patient or patient's family suggests I look up his/her name on the Internet.

The first time I looked up a patient's name was to find out whether she was who she said she was. If she was published, then I would definitely find a book that she authored. It turned out she was a professor and her ratings on Rate My Professor would make me think twice about registering for her class. From fact-checking, I went on to reading patient obituaries. What I wanted was the knowledge that the patients I cared for were more than persons with diagnoses. I didn't want to define them by their illness. There's some comfort to see that friends and family miss them from looking at the online comments on the obituaries. But I wanted to color their lives for my sake. Maybe because I never asked them in the first place. So I look for the marks on the tree, that they were here, that they lived.