POIGNANT and POWERFUL –

Aug. 10, 2023 – One thing I had plenty of was time. When I was seeing patients, time had moved too quickly; I always ran behind. I had recurrent nightmares about charts piling up. Then, when records went paperless, my dreams did too, featuring screens of unpopulated templates. Now that I was a patient, time moved too slowly. Minutes seemed like hours — or became hours — as I waited for messages and phone calls to my doctors to be returned, waited for my next dose of pain medication, waited to be out of pain. To pass the time, I scrolled through social media and binge-watched television shows. When I tired of these, I turned to books. Not being an e-reader, I favored slim volumes I could hold easily in my nondominant, uninjured left hand.

One of these was Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella The Metamorphosis. I’d read it many times, including once a few years earlier with the monthly reading group I facilitate at my hospital. The story concerns Gregor Samsa, a 27-year-old man, the sole support of his parents and teenage sister with whom he lives, who wakes one morning to find that he has turned into a giant insect.

READ@NEJM