my hospital wing has no windows.

there are days when you can't save anyone. there's nothing to be done for any patient you touch, and they know that, and their doctors know that, and someone will have to make a phone call and tell the people who love them that, and on those days i'm not so grateful for anything as i am for not having to be the person who makes those calls, one after another after another.

animals guard their disease. they flinch when you place your hand on their skin over the hidden tumor, reach around anxiously to nudge you away from their secret. sick but treatable cats get furious at being handled, they scream and writhe and lunge and demand that you let them sleep it off in peace, but the ones who can't be helped know, and they don't waste any energy getting angry. still, they can tell when you're about to make a decisive discovery, and they'll squirm in a pathetic way that proves they aren't really trying to get away from you, they're just embarrassed at being found out in such an undignified manner, in a strange room filled with strange people. cats want very much to be allowed to die alone. dogs want this, too, but they want it differently. dogs hide their mortality from their own people, but they don't worry so much about what the rest of us know. they don't want you to find their cancer, but it's because they're worried about whom you'll reveal it to. i've seen dogs lie flat and motionless for entire days while people walk in and out of their runs attaching monitors, drawing blood, aspirating tissues, poking and stabbing and shaving while the pet stares ahead glassily, not responding to even the most invasive of actions, and everyone around them will be sure they won't last through the night. but in the evening their families will come to the hospital to visit with them, and they'll stand up happily and bark, and when we say that we're doing all we can, or have done all we can, those families refuse to believe us. this is what their dog wanted--to rescue them one last time. i had to put my dog to sleep on my twenty-fourth birthday. she had a tumor in her spleen that had caused internal bleeding and she hadn't eaten in two days; by the time my mother called to tell me what was happening my dog was too weak to even lift her head, but when i walked through the door she looked up at me and wagged her tail. when i sat on the floor to talk to her i was crying, and she wouldn't look me in the face. i worry all the time that she died thinking she had let me down.

someone has to make those phone calls.

a lot of the oncologists and emergency doctors are compulsive runners, five miles before work, five miles on their lunch breaks, ten miles when they get home; i'm sure in that position i'd do whatever it took, too, to fall into bed too exhausted to think at all about what i'd done that day, or what i'd failed to do.

today was one of those days. every dog on the ultrasound table looked up at me and licked my nose as the radiologist inserted a needle into the inoperable mass in the pup's lung or liver or kidney, and after nine hours i walked out of the hospital into the barely breathing remnants of a hurricane that has killed what may be thousands of good, blameless people and watched as a woman in an enormous vehicle leaned on her horn because the person in front of her had chosen not to run the red light, and i thought that nobody gets what he or she deserves. i came home to my little cat who had missed me all day and who tried to climb up my leg, she was so anxious to be in my lap, whom i would give up anything for and will also not be able to save, and i thought that maybe i would take up jogging.

how does anyone have a child? i can keep the tiny life that depends on me safe inside of my house and know that the worst things that happen to her in a day are my going to work and shutting her out of the bathroom, and i feel awful knowing that i have to upset her even that much. but people have children and send them out into the world, this mad, murderous, unnavigable world, because sooner or later they have no choice but to do so. how do they manage it? how do they convince themselves it isn't a cruelty just to create that life in the first place, knowing what it's going to have to fight its way through? how do they convince themselves that they'll find a way to keep that person safe?

i couldn't do it. i would be too afraid that my child would turn out like me, and i couldn't condemn someone i would love so desperately to the sort of fumbling and guilty existence i've found myself in.

i would like very much, though, to adopt a dog.