1. I thought Stephen King’s excerpt was very interesting.

1. I thought Stephen King’s excerpt was very interesting. I really enjoyed the part where he described his visits to the ear doctor. He used tons of detail that really described how painful his first memory was. He Correlated the doctor trips with a taxi. Every few weeks he saw a taxi arrive, and he knew where he was going. I like how he started out with something as simple as a taxi. One of my favorite lines is, “each time I swallowed, pain lit up the sides of my face like a jukebox.” I think this is a very descriptive simile. Next, Stephen also correlated the doctor with the smell of alcohol. All of this description about the ear specialist gives us insight into how bad his first memory was. The glass castle article was also very engaging because her first memory was very intense. She caught on fire. She remembered the nurses asking her questions about her parents. She later understood that it was for child services. I enjoyed the dialogue that she included about her dad taking her from the hospital when he said, “you just trust your old man.”

2. Memory-

I woke up at 5:30 am and started to get dressed in my khakis and maroon polo with “Med academy” inscribed near the top. I ate breakfast to reduce the risk of fainting while I’m at the hospital. At 5:55 I left my house and started for Glenbrook hospital. It was my typical 15 minute commute that I take every tuesday and thursday.

When I got to the hospital, I traveled to the basement and walked in the respiratory therapy room where the respiratory therapists have their lockers and equipment. We talked about patients for about 20 minutes.

Then, we headed up to the Intensive Care Unit to start the day and see patients. Most of the patients that we saw were older people who had a hard time breathing, and some couldn’t even breathe on their own and were hooked up to a ventilator.

One patient that stuck out to me was a woman named Sally in her late 60s. She used to be a heavy smoker, and now, she was suffering with a tube jarred into her trachea. She couldn’t speak nor breathe on her own, which is no way to live. The respiratory therapist that I was with explained to me that she will never be able to breathe on her own and will always be on a ventilator. The only changes she will endure are whether she is intubated through the mouth or through the trachea.

Sally is like a fish out of water. Flopping on the pier, gasping for air, knowing what is to come next. She can hardly breathe, and she knows that death is approaching. All that the future holds for her is suffering. She will continue to suffer until she takes her last breathe and relieves herself into a deep sleep.

Seeing these patients first-hand makes me wonder why people smoke. In this day and age, we have clear evidence of what it does to people, yet some still do it.

2. Characters:

Mercy, the respiratory therapist I was paired with. She was very informative and very good at what she does. When I first met her, she walked into the RT room wearing her maroon scrubs with a smile on her face. She was a pleasant person to be around.

Sally the patient (not her actual name)- sally was an overweight woman with a tube sticking out of her neck, which is kind of hard to miss. She was obviously wearing a hospital gown. She couldn’t talk, so I couldn’t get much insight to her personality, but she seemed nice. You would think it would be uncomfortable for her to eat, but she ate a ton, the nurses said that was very unusual for a trach patient.

3. Conversations/dialogue

Sally could not speak so there was no dialogue there. However, she did try to mouth that she didnt want me to perform any medical procedures on her bc I am a high school student. The nurses and I reassured here that I was solely there to observe. Mercy and I talked for quite a bit and she explained to me everything that was happening. When she explained Sally’s case to me, she said, “We have to move over here. We don’t want the patient to hear us because they can get sensitive.”

4. Theme/lesson learned

I have always known that smoking is bad and I have never planned on being a smoker. But there was something about Sally’s life that really hammered that home. The fact that she will always be hooked up to a breathing machine and will never be able to talk is reason enough for me to never smoke. You always see commercials of smokers with medical issues on tv, but seeing it first-hand is so much more intense and personal. Not to mention, the ventilator is not pretty nor is it small. So having is big clunky machine attached to your throat sounds pretty uninviting to me.

5. Scene

The hospital is a typical. It smells very clean and looks just like any ordinary hospital. However, when you walk up to the ICU, the atmosphere changes. They try to make it as pleasant as possible, but the fact that most of the patients could be dying makes it a little gloomy. Most of the patients were pretty old, so the energy was pretty dull. For me, it is very interesting to be seeing all the medical procedures. However, there are no kids laughing and having fun, no music playing, not much happiness for the patients. For example, a family gathered in room 12 to say goodbye to their father and grandpa, as they decided to take him off his ventilator.

Extended metaphor:

Fish out of water