Sunshine

There is nothing quite like living in a new city. It’s exciting, challenging, but ultimately – for me – quite lonely. It exacerbates all my insecurities, and serves to emphasize my feelings of isolation. It’s a strange thing to feel alone in a city of eight million, but maybe that’s why it’s so unsettling.

It has been gray and cloudy recently. It rained much of my day off last weekend – why not?

I am working this month on a thoracic surgical oncology service. The patients could not be more different than those I encountered while serving on the trauma team. These patients are older, much more educated, and carry with them that loaded label of cancer patient. Theirs is a death that is slow, not unexpected, and usually very painful. It is an agonizing process to watch, as their bodies mutate and grow uncontrollably, killing them from the inside. One woman looked at me yesterday and said “I don’t recognize myself anymore.” It’s horrible.

Yesterday the clouds and rain continued. But the floor secretary had the antidote. She came waltzing in, with a big grin on her face. She pulled from her bag a plastic flowerpot with a single yellow plastic daisy standing in the middle. She plopped it on the counter and hit a button – and the flower sang:

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.
You make me happy when the skies are grey.
You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you.
Please don’t take my sunshine away.

I used to be a ray of sunshine. But not anymore – not now.

Right on cue, the sun broke through the clouds. I guess I can defer the role of sunshine for the time being.