Call Me Meg
Megan Hansen
I was raised in a place where, on a clear day, you can see for miles. I was raised on sunflower fields and long stretches of two-lane roads and Kansas sunsets and the kind of quiet you can only get in the country. I think it is because of this upbringing that the inpatient setting, with its small, curtained-off rooms, beeping monitors, and peculiar antiseptic smell often makes me feel boxed-in.
It was my first hospital session, and I was already feeling trapped. I walked into the patient’s room with my mentor for the session, wishing I could be anywhere else. I pulled up a chair and sat down, hoping to get the interview and physical over with as quickly as possible.
Her body was curved into a c-shape, her shoulders hunched forward and her knees bent at a 45-degree angle. Her right arm, bound in a cast, was elevated, and her fingers were pale and beginning to yellow. She was small and only made smaller by folding in on herself. She had a picc-line in her arm, a heart monitor around her neck, and a mess of blankets bunched up around her legs. Most striking, though, was the look I saw in her eyes; she, like me, felt trapped, caged. “Hi,” she said, her tone cautious but friendly. “I’m Megan. Call me Meg.”
At the recognition of my own name, I smiled and felt some of the tension leave my shoulders. “Hi Meg. Tell me your story”.
She told me she was working in her barn with her horses when she fell on a nail and punctured her hand. While in the hospital, she had had multiple surgeries on her hand and several courses of antibiotics. I had my list of questions that I knew I should ask her: can you describe the pain? How has the pain in your hand changed since you’ve been here? Do you have any associated symptoms? And yet as she spoke, I found myself leaning toward her, setting down my pen, and listening.
Slowly, and with the occasional lengthy silence, the layers began to peel away and the wary look in her eye when we met began to make sense. She was, she told me in a matter-of-fact way, an addict. “Three years clean”, she stated proudly. She then began to weave her history together for me. Several years ago, she had fallen off her horse and herniated a disc. Her doctor prescribed opioids. “They were good,” she told me, with her to-the-point tone that I recognized well from the farmer side of my family. “I had never felt relaxed like that before. Light.” Later, she told me, her doctor would be arrested for overprescribing and receiving kickbacks from the pharmaceutical company—she even witnessed the DEA arresting him while she was in the waiting room—but that would come too late for Meg. An opioid addiction transformed to a heroin addiction.
Trying to get care for her hand, Meg then discovered that the same healthcare system that kickstarted a decades-long struggle with addiction would hold no compassion for her now. Sitting in an ER waiting room with a hand getting more inflamed by the minute, she could hear healthcare workers discriminating against her and the words they were using: “Methadone.” “Addict.” “Wouldya-look-at-those-track-marks”. In her head, Meg was screaming “I’ve been clean for years now!” But, with her voice stolen from her in that ER, all she could do was sit silently and hope that care would come.
As Meg neared the end of her story, I began to realize that I was going to have to say something. The problem was, nothing in my training had prepared me for the level of heartbreak I felt for her or for the depth of the anger I felt toward those who had wronged her. As I frantically searched for the words that wouldn’t come, all I could think about was how her name was my name and she lived on a farm like my grandparents and that her addiction was one I recognized well from my own community and that we both felt trapped and my-breathing-began-to-quicken-and-I-felt-tears-coming-on-and-oh-god-I-have-to-hold-it-in-because-I-can’t-cry-in-front-of-my-first-patient-because-strong-women-don’t-cry-and-that-won’t-help-Meg-anyway-but-I-just—.
“Meg, do you mind if I interject?” The calming voice of my mentor brought me back to the present and my breathing began to slow.
My mentor pulled up a chair next to the patient’s bed, gently touched her good hand, and said something that I will never forget: “Meg,” she said, “You deserved so much better. You have been subject to some of the worst abuse our system imposes on its patients. I also want you to know that I am proud of you that you have stopped using, but that even if you hadn’t, you are deserving of compassionate care because you’re a human being. Finally, the fact that you have every reason to be angry and distrustful at this healthcare system but you still you took the time to let a young learner sit and talk and learn from you is an incredible act of generosity and I am deeply thankful to you for that.”
As I put myself back in that hospital room to remember Meg, to remember her story, I envision catch phrases swirling over her head. Opioid epidemic. Corruption. Negligence. Discrimination. Meg was at the epicenter of everything wrong with American medicine, and I would later tell her story to family and friends as I railed against the pharmaceutical industry, against a profit model of healthcare, against opponents of harm reduction. But equally as salient as my anger is my gratitude for that mentor. She stepped in to build trust in a patient who desperately needed it and at the same time reminded me of the impossible power of a moment or two of honesty and warmth. I am equally thankful for Meg’s compassion. She has experienced the worst of the healthcare system but had the grace and the courage to allow a student to learn from her. Experiencing the compassion of these two women—one showing compassion for a system that did not deserve it and one encouraging the patient that she herself deserved compassion—showed me that little moments of humanity can have an immense impact. Since that day, the inpatient setting no longer feels too small.
Megan Hansen is a second-year medical student interested in public policy, advocacy, and the power of narrative. This piece was one of two winners selected for the 2020 Gold Humanism Honor Society Narratives in Medicine Contest.
