March 2018

My patient was dying, and her son was angry. She was eighty-nine and buckling under the weight of septic shock. With his mother failing, her son had lost it. “You will regret letting her die!” he said as he lunged at me. He was intercepted but continued to stare me down. I tried to hold his gaze as softly as I could, willing him not to kill me.

I grew up in a gun-free family and neighborhood. As a child of the 1950s and 1960s, I associated guns with the Westerns I saw at the movie theater or with the Lone Ranger, the hero of my favorite TV show.

Then guns intruded on my life–twice.