I go to see the man in bed five.

He winks at me. Cracked lips separate to reveal an imperfect set of yellow teeth as a wry smile spreads slowly across his face. It comes with an enormous effort. He looks worse; the burden of disease seems to weigh heavier with each passing hour. Sickness has slowly reshaped him, like an obsessive sculptor continually revising his creation. His wife fiddles nervously with her plain wedding band; I feel his decline, but for her each step in the inexorable march of his illness is devastation. She looks at me, and in her eyes I see a deep love and a profound fear. They have been married for forty years. He tells me about his two children. He loves them. His daughter lives in Australia. He has a dog that he takes for walks on the common. He waves a frail arm towards the trees outside the window and tells me that he is looking forward to going home. In our short time together he has granted me open access to his private world, to the countless unique experiences that conspire to create an individual. I will miss him when he is gone, the man in bed five.

This once vibrant character is dulled by his sterile surroundings: the bland hospital gown robs him of his humanity; the peeling walls and filthy windows drain him; plastic tubes run into and out of his body. For a moment the hospital is a colossal parasite, nourished by this wasted figure; it breathes in around me and exhales a fetid breath, content at having shelled the man in bed five.

I am protected. My fraying badge and cheap stethoscope defend me. The flimsy chart I hold is my shield. I am part of the profession, this most noble profession, and to hurt is weakness, to feel is fragility. He is his disease; he is a hospital number, a set of laboratory results, a trace on a machine, a faint bleep heard from the nursing station. To watch him break I must stand on the other side of the glass. I bid a clinical farewell to the peculiar collection of observations that was once the man in bed five.

One day the faint bleep fades. The rush of clinical medicine devours the mourning period; a different set of observations arrives to occupy the bed, and there are pressing results to chase and urgent investigations to order. He remains in my mind as the hours pass. Is it appropriate to grieve? Would it be easier to succumb to indifference? These were the questions asked of me by the man in bed five. Can you balance compassion with detachment? Can you manage the intolerable pain of regular loss? Can you walk the fine line? I bury these thoughts and continue to work.

As finals draw closer I find myself more frequently troubled by these questions.

I still have no answers.

Correspondence: Jack Garnham, Imperial College, London (jack.garnham09@imperial.ac.uk)