It was Thanksgiving. There's always a certain dread that accompanies working during the holidays: knowing that your family is already gathered, celebrating and indulging, you feel a pit in your stomach while you mentally prepare for twelve hours in the intensive care unit. Hoping for an uneventful day, I walked in to the intensive care unit and read the assignment board. Bed six. "He's sick," the overnight charge nurse told me. "It's going to be a busy day." "He" was a young man who had been in our unit for months, admitted with a mysterious illness. We had been unable to control or even isolate a cause for his constellation of symptoms, and he was rapidly progressing into multisystem organ failure. His course was complicated, confusing, and heartbreaking. His parents had taken up residence at his bedside; they had learned the lingo of the ICU, learned what the waveforms on his bedside monitor meant, and knew the ins and outs of every medication and treatment plan we had suggested for their son. They had become staples in our unit. They knew us all; they greeted us by name; they asked about our families.
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