Ironically, months of sustained inpatient care has made it more difficult to separate my own judgment of meaningful care from the care currently decided on. Ideally, as we are taught (albeit subconsciously), we work up ever minute problem, sustaining livelihood at the expense of practicality. How many patients stay on endlessly in the hospital, accumulating, rather than resolving problems, until they become virtually lifeless, forgotten by their families, trailed only by a stack of excess charts documenting the person they once were and their slow deterioration into a meaningless existence. But it is precisely those words which I feel compelled to censor, though at times it feels to be a tacitly understood sentiment, both by those who make the decisions, and those family members whose common sense have not been superceded by feelings of love, guilt, or worse, expectation. In my ability to only palliate, and not to cure, as was promised to me in my formative years, I have become perfunctory in my actions, limited by my futility. No one ever warned you that inpatient medicine does more to discourage enthusiasm than to feed the desire for knowledge. In my brief career as doctor, I have already become so jaded.