Today, a day replete with anxious family members and arguments about petty electrolyte supplements, reminds me of the banality of our purpose as residents. To dangle false promises of imminent discharge, to report artificially saccharine prognoses to family members of those without prognoses at all, to direct the anxious mothers and wives away from the forest and toward the trees. Yes the cancer has invaded his liver, but today his sodium is up to 133. To this end inpatient medicine is an endless cycling of those trapped in the limbo between life and death, whose so-called livelihood consists of a constant shuffling between the hospital and nursing home, whose bodies, with each hospital admission, become petri dishes for increasingly tenacious organisms, who, not unlike saprophytes, effect bodily erosions no masochist could even dream of. And of dealing with family members who readily testify to their neglect with their inconsistent appearance, whose presence is characterized by so much misdirected anger, whose guilt is as latent to them as it is blatant to the observer. Moreover I am frustrated at how our medical culture advocates the superiority of meaningless life to dignified death, thinking of death only as failure, and not often enough of the relief that it inevitably brings. Such that our quest for the optimal potassium becomes paramount, and our respect for these poor persons become secondary.