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SEATTLE
HISTORICALLY, MARK HAD been good with bad news.
It'd been one of the first things they'd been taught in medical school, the practice of sitting down and gently informing a loved one that their family member had passed away.
It was hard but it was tender, telling them that they'd done everything they could. But sometimes, things just didn't work out how people wanted it to, people died in surgery because there was nothing else they could do.
A bleeder went unnoticed or an organ just simply stopped working, and a patient would die right in front of their eyes.
Mark remembered once, on a cardio rotation, he'd watched someone's heart quite literally burst in the centre of the patient's chest–– he'd been given the task of giving that bad news to the patient's father himself.
A small resident with his hand on the shaking shoulder of a man triple his age. It'd been a car crash, the father had driven into parked cars after passing out from heatstroke. His son had suffered a severe wall rupture and that had been it.
He'd bled out in seconds, and Mark had had to watch the grieving process start right in front of him. An extensive, gruelling process that Mark had decided he didn't want for himself––– why love when loss can be so fucking painful?
Of course, he'd told more patients of their losses over time.
It was part of the job. He found it just got easier, the more people's lives got ruined, the more people he saved. He was proud of the fact that he didn't often lose patients, that more often than not, Mark pulled through and went through the reinforcement of the grateful and grateful tears.
Success was not just addictive, it was gratifying: he really did not like having to deal with breaking that bad news.
But even so, there was that consciousness through every single day: of how closely loss followed his every win.
He'd listened to Andrew Perkins talk about it at length for an hour in that hospital-wide seminar, of how Andrew had spoken so animatedly about grief and it's physical and emotional impact on the human experience. He'd really engaged with it, taken them all collectively through how it broke into the human psyche, really forcing everyone to reflect on loss and how exactly mourning efficiently could help you rather than hinder you––
Doctor Perkins had, unfortunately, forgotten to tell them how to mourn something you never had in the first place.
Now that sort of loss? Mark didn't know what to do with it.
