Week 6: Distance between life and death

This week I had a chance to attend one of autopsy seminars in pathology department. It started with one of the residents introducing a specific patient case and gross pictures of different organs and their respective biopsy sample pictures. Then the seminar was continued with a Q&A section with descriptions of symptoms and autopsy results then asked attended residents to try to diagnose the cause of death. Even though it was filled with difficult terminologies but each case was unique and interesting. While I was getting excited for seeing and learning, part of me felt sad and unfortunate. Most of the patients died from acute reasons, such as acute heart failure or lung failure. Although some of the patients had long-term exposure to certain chemicals that eventually caused their death, there were simply not enough symptoms to bring them for a physical check in the hospital and when death came, it was sudden and not prepared. We right now standing from a point of a doctor, a researcher, but we could never know when the role would be switched. When I was an undergraduate, we had a small project researching the effect of smoking on lung cancer. At the end, the conclusion was even though smoking has a non-deniable effect on causing different types of cancer, there were still decent amount of people who smoked for their whole life and never had big problems. On the contrary, some people never touched cigaret in their life but died from lung cancer. To some extent it made me feel really unfair and even if I try to live as healthily as I can, I still have chances to get all those diseases. Personally, I have been hospitalized several times for the past years but every time it seemed to be just another random event. Fortunately nothing has been too serious so far but for the cases they showed us today, many of them didn't get a chance to get diagnosed, or even died during the process of getting transported to the ICU. 

We can never predict what is going to happen the next day and sometimes we could be standing on the line between life and death and not realize it. There were time that I almost was run over by a car; there were time that almost drowned in a swimming pool and there were time that I worked for several days without sleeping and almost felt a heart attack. Right now, I m still learning how to treasure everyday of my life and hope tomorrow I wouldn't regret the decision I made today.