This lady is tough. While fleeing New Orleans from Katrina, she spent the 9-hour drive from New Orleans to Hattiesburg (usually an hour and a half) in a full blown CHF exacerbation. She had taken a ton of Lasix before hitting the road with her bedside commode in the back of my dad’s car. One of her biggest complaints after Katrina destroyed her house was that her prosthetic bras (she’d had a mastectomy for breast cancer) had been ruined. “Those damn things are expensive!” she lamented.

Sometimes I wish I could take her to work with me so she could tell all the whiney 20-somethings with the sniffles what to do with themselves.

One 90-year-old lady sticks out in my mind. She had tripped and hit her head on a doorjamb, effectively scalping herself, with at least a 10-cm laceration on her head. Oh, and of course she was on warfarin. She and my Gram would have been buds.

She had a huge hematoma, and once I cleared that out, I discovered that she had cut herself right down to the skull. “You must have a hard head,” I joked with her. She just laughed. I then proceeded to explain to her that she’d probably have a visible scar. Without hesitation she told me, “I ain’t enterin’ no beauty contest! Just sew me up!”

All righty, then. And so, after 30 inner sutures, 30 outer sutures, 30 staples, multiple sutures and cautery to ligate bleeders, she was done.

A week later she came back to have her staples taken out, and she saw me as I was getting off that morning. “Come give me a hug!” she called. And so I did.

I miss my grandmothers. One because I don’t live that close to her, one because she died 9 years ago. Both of my grandfathers have died as well. So I just have my Gram.

And when I see my older patients, I see her, my Momsey, or my grandfathers. I think of it as my job to get them back to their lives, so they can enjoy their grandchildren and maybe a trip to the casino. Yes, of course, with their oxygen tanks.

Dr. Bundy is an assisting medical director at Baptist Medical Center East in Montgomery, Ala., and a former photojournalist, who not only sings in the car, but talks to herself, is addicted to diet drinks and shoes, and thinks emergency medicine is the greatest specialty.