I keep planning to write here, but everything I want to write about is terribly depressing.

I am sitting at work on a Sunday afternoon, waiting for someone to come in to say goodbye to their dying husband.

A couple of days ago, a long term patient, with wit to match her comorbidities, tried to die. She is in ICU on life support now, but pretty soon they’ll give her the chance to try to manage without it. I suspect she won’t manage, and that she’s joked with us for the last time. I am tortured by the big bruise on her chest from the CPR.

Last night I arrived home and gave my daughter a hug, and at that moment got called back to the hospital.

So, instead of writing a depressing essay on the depressing side of medicine, I choose to stop that now and write at least as many happy and uplifting things.

It’s a sunny day and I got to spend some of it tickling my boy today. On call is much better than being rostered on.

We did three operations for young people last week which mean they won’t have a stroke they were likely to have.

We created a fistula for a young man which will help him survive long enough to get a kidney transplant.

A man we were treating with incurable cancer last week called his estranged sister to get back in touch.

One of our patients finally agreed to have her leg amputated and now has no pain.

We diagnosed a man with massive pulmonary emboli before they killed him. He got treatment and will recover to ride his horse again.

Medicine is wearing. I tend to focus on the grime and forget to look up to see the rainbows.