Every medical case, to paraphrase the writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, is lived twice: once in the wards and once in memory. Some of what follows is still intensely vivid, as if it were shot in high-def video. Other parts are blurry - in part because I must have subconsciously deleted or altered the memories. I was 33 then and a senior resident at a hospital in Boston. I had been assigned to the Cardiac Care Unit, a quasi I.C.U. where some of the most acutely ill patients were hospitalized.
In mid-September - it had been a moody, rain-drenched month, as I recall I admitted a 52-year-old man to the unit. I'll call him by the first letter of his given name, M. As medical interns, we were forewarned by the senior residents not to identify too closely with patients. "