Doctor here. I’ve seen a good handful of miraculous turnarounds, but the one that stuck with me is a little different.

I was a medical student, and an elderly gentleman had come in with a worsening of his heart disease. Neither the patient or the cardiac surgeons were thrilled with the idea of surgery. So we were treating him medically the best we could, but he wasn’t making much progress. While talking with him one afternoon, I discovered that his wife was also very sick, and also hospitalized. Because hers was an autoimmune problem, and his was a cardiac problem, they were kept apart in two different hospital units. So, we asked around and got approval to transfer his wife up to the cardiac unit into a shared room with her sweetheart. They were both so ill that they couldn’t get out of bed, so we pushed them together. After they all got set up, everybody left to do their paperwork, but I stuck around and talked to them for a bit. They shared with me that they had been married for nearly 70 years, and bragged about each other, and how grateful they were to have shared their lives with each other. They held hands across their hospital beds and expressed a profound contentment with their time on earth.

The following day, I went to check on them on early morning pre-rounds, but the room was empty. The overnight nurse explained that they had fallen asleep holding hands, and both had passed away in the night.

She got pregnant. I’m a female as well, so.. two tacos doesn’t equal quac Y’know?

I joked about knowing she was cheating she broke down and admitted it.