Anecdotally Speaking

The limp infant child lay across her lap. His vacant stare and sunken dry eyes revealed that she was losing him. His panting breaths were agonizing as he gave every ounce of life he had left to survive a minute longer. His strength and vigor was nearly gone as weakness visibly weighed on him, pulling him down into a death of stillness and sorrow.

I looked from him to her, the mother of this dying baby. Oh my heart is pierced! I feel nothing but the sharp pang of fear and pain at the direness of the situation and the helplessness and hopelessness. I am a parent in that brief moment and I feel nothing but what it is like to have my dear child torn away from my arms forever and I feel like I can't bear it.

But I look into her eyes and I could never have been prepared for what I saw. Where I expected a look of expectation and pleading, imploring me to try my best to help however I can, to do what ever I can to save her very ill baby, I saw instead a look of despair more devastating, more penetrating, more consuming than any I could have imagined. And I was beset.

This mother never possessed anything close to an expectation that I could or would make any difference. To her it was of no consequence anything that I said or did that day. As a doctor, of coarse, I did everything that I knew how to do with the equipment and supplies that I had with me to save the life of her baby. We were in the most remote jungles of the Orinoco River Delta in Venezuela. The indigenous people we were seeing had never before been treated by medical doctors, and probably have not been since.

My treatment most likely did not help this little child. And though I am sad to this day about the likely prospect that he died after I left, my greatest grief derives from not being able to impart any comfort to his mother through the act of my kindness. The offering of help motivated by sincere compassion, even if it proves ineffective in the end, usually engenders hope when people face despair, even overwhelming despair.

But not on that day. Not with that mother. Not in that village. And I don't know why. And it bothers me.

I came back home. I continued with my regular routine and busy medical practice. Not a single day has gone by since my encounter with the sick baby and his mother in the jungles of the Orinoco River Delta, when every patient I treat does not come to me with an expectation that I will do what I can to help them.

But I will never forget the day when I looked into the eyes of a young woman who possessed a kind of despair that we know nothing of around here. A rare kind of despair that I don't think any human being should have to bear.

And it haunts me.