The rain fell. It fell hard. It was a mate drinking kind of day. It was a flood-warning day. And the rain reflected my mood. I’d seen a rainbow just before the rain started. With the rain comes rainbows, but on this rainy day I was feeling the grayness more than the light reflected off the raindrops.

And I thought about a text I’d gotten from a friend not many days before the storm hit my town. She’s a good friend and checks in when the world is in shambles and I’m ignoring the news – which is to say, she checks in whenever something happens in the world I should know about because I almost always ignore the news these days. Despite my efforts at ignorant bliss, I’d heard about some of what she said already. And I felt the same as she: what we were doing seemed pointless when so many people were suffering. And yet, it seemed school would give us skills to better help the world. However, the future is hard to predict.

On this rainy day, I thought about allies and who we can trust. I’d recently seen a patient riddled with cancer. It doesn’t require one moment of school to recognize a dying person. This patient was the picture of death. Their eyes were dull, their movements slow, and their skin ashen. The patient couldn’t eat, yet begged for food, and now their cancer had spread so much that it was making connections between their organs. Their pain was barely controlled. They didn’t desire surgery or treatment; they wanted the pain to stop. They wanted to eat. On one hand, the patient and their healthcare team knew exactly when the pain would stop – the word wasn’t mentioned. The family of the patient, on the other hand, pushed for treatment. Treatment in this case meant prolonging life but not ending the pain and not preventing the eventual end we already knew.

Medicine can’t change fate, nothing can. The family had convinced the patient to continue with treatment, and yet the patient wavered. The patient didn’t want to disappoint their family, but they were so tired. I reflected on their family’s choice to push the patient to continue fighting. I realized that I hope that the folks I call allies are there when I need them, when the going gets tough. And I hope that in the tough moments of my battles they think about what’s best for me, even if it’s not their preference.

I wondered if the betrayal of a family wasn’t so different from the betrayal of a country. In this case, though, the patient wasn’t allowed to pursue their end in peace. The news of Afghanistan was quite the opposite. We’d left so many allies to die perhaps avoidable deaths. And I thought back to the day the Twin Towers fell. I was in 6^th grade and now I was in medical school. Seeing images of babies handed to strangers on planes in a hope they’d have a better life didn’t seem like much progress from the smoke and rubble that filled New York City when the towers fell. Politics are complicated, but I wondered about the definition of “progress”; was it simply a fiction invented to instill hope? I wondered about trust; which allies are ones we can trust? I wondered what could have been done differently.

On this rainy day, I thought about the good of the individual and the good of the whole. I’d seen a young patient recently walk away from treatment. It would have been a simple procedure with an 80% chance of completely curing their disease without them even needing to stay in the hospital. Declining treatment is a right. But by saying “no” this patient had most likely condemned themselves to metastatic cancer in under a decade. They’d decided to die of cancer well before they turned 50 because their cancer wasn’t curable once it spread. When they declined treatment, the cancer hadn’t spread yet and we most likely could have cured it.

I weighed my feelings about this patient’s decision against my feelings about people declining COVID vaccines. They were both examples of people making health decisions. It is our right to decide what happens to our bodies. But, choosing to die of cancer compared to choosing to put others at risk of infection feels starkly different. You see, the thing about cancer is you can’t pass it to others. The thing about viruses is that they spread. While you might be just fine after catching COVID; others may die when they’re infected. And it could be you who infects them.

The rain fell and I thought about the nature of the world. I had an exam looming and I wanted to ignore everything else. Like rain drops on a rainy day you don’t have to look that far for sad things in life. It’s also true that with rain comes rainbows. And while I’m certain I like rainbows, I’m not certain they make up for whole rainy days.  And it seems that some of us get more moments with rainbows than others. There’s something about the angle between the sun and the water drops. Not everyone has the same angle.