canned salmon and death.

Has anyone had canned salmon? Is it just me or does it look and taste exactly like tuna? It's sorta uncanny, seeing as the tin is the same and all. And yes, I checked - I was actually eating salmon and not a tin of tuna.

The above is, of course, because I just had dinner. :)

That aside.

Paget's disease lady died a couple of days back. I was talking to her on Sunday, and she was in some pain. To take her mind off it and the cannula I talked to her about sleeping with mascara on. That was our last conversation. At the end my registrar was wildly prescribing drugs to buy her a few more hours so her husband could see her before she died. It was so sudden, and I know it sounds cliched, but that's so true. Hah the thing about a long-stay ward, you actually build relationships with your patients. I'm glad my reg kept me away from aortic aneurysm lady who was in palliative care (she didn't want to be treated - she just wanted to die), just so I didn't have to face the death of too many patients that I knew at once.

Everyone says we'll get used to it.

But somehow I don't think it's right to 'get used to' death.

But obviously we're not normal people here. Normal people don't have to face death on an everyday basis. I suppose getting used to it is like our defense mechanism, how our brain recognises that if we grieve for everyone every day we'll eventually snap.

Doctoring is very different from what I thought it would be.