That was Virginia’s second visit to the hospital in the ten days of the new year. It also ended up being the last.

Virginia was a patient we all knew. She came to the hospital frequently. The aphorism of our intern year was, if you had not taken care of Virginia once, you were not going to graduate out of internship. And that was hardly an exaggeration- almost no one in my internal medicine residency class had been through their internships without admitting her at least once. I admitted her twice. She knew our faces — she never really knew our names though — although she would give us a bored “I know you” every time we met her in the ER exam bay for an admission.

That evening I was signing out in the ICU after a rather long shift; an attending physician came asking if we knew about a certain patient who had died in the OR the previous night.

“Some Vivian Hunt or something,” he said. “She used to come frequently to the hospital.”

You mean Virginia Hunt? I suggested.

“Yes that’s the one.”

She died? A sigh of incredulity escaped my mouth; it suddenly felt as if a wall had fallen off the room we were standing in. Virginia had become some sort of an irrefutable constant in our working lives.  I had met Virginia in the ER just a few day ago, she was in with some cold- and the constant was suddenly gone.

Memories flooded my mind on the drive back home. The first time I met her must have been sometime in October 2010, when I was still a greenhorn of an intern. She had come in with chest pain.

“Are you my doctor?”, she asked, when I walked into the room.

Yes I am, I said.

“I need my Benadryl. I take 25 mg four times a day. And don’t give me the pills, they don’t do me no good. I need IV.”

I was almost taken aback by my patient’s surefootedness. Her skin was dry all through, maybe it’s the kidney failure giving her the itch, I thought.  I ordered the Benadryl. Virginia was happy.

On any given day, Virginia was as sick as anyone able to walk on two legs could get. She had a barely pumping heart  with valves that leaked like a sieve, her kidneys did not work.  She was on dialysis, she had seizures, she had had strokes in the past, her heart rhythm was abnormal and without blood thinning medications, she had a chance upward of 10 percent of being felled with a blood clot in the brain year on year. Barely in her early 50s, and  Virginia was already walking in and out of death’s door everyday.

Every other week or so, she would come to the hospital with chest pain, or some variation thereof. Although the vessels in her heart were not blocked, she had enough reasons to have heart related symptoms. The constant fueling on heroin did not help. Yet Virginia was rather unapologetic about her habits- any conversation about the risks of drug abuse ended with a terse “I know.”

In April 2011, Virginia had a major heart surgery to replace the leaky valves in her heart. The surgery went well, but within a week or so she was back in the ER. We were worried the new valve may have something to do with the chest pain she came with. The valve appeared okay, it was the surgical wound on the chest that was hurting. She had also managed to lay her hands on some heroin.

Every time she came in with something like chest pain, she would often develop some other problem in the hospital completely unrelated to the first one, like an infection. She would be discharged in a few days and then she would be back in  a week or two. This went on in an unending loop. Virginia’s being in the hospital at any time was almost a given, not to mention the times she was admitted to some other hospital.

Stunned by her death, the next day I sat at a computer to reflect on her hospital visits. In 2012 she had been to the hospital 19 times. In 2011 she was in the hospital a whopping 51 times. After her surgery in 2011, we changed her primary care provider. She had 4 visits with him in the 20 odd months since then. She had a home health nurse visiting her every so often. In the last few years, she had had in excess of 100 x-rays, close to two dozen CT scans and every other kind of test imaginable. The only test she did not get done seemed to be a urine study — she just did not make any urine.

That fateful evening when she died Virginia had a fall at her home. She was dizzy when she came to the hospital. An initial CT scan was normal however within a few hours she was progressively worse. She was then found to have bled in her head. She was whisked to the OR and the blood collection evacuated. However she was not able to make it out of the OR — after half an hour of desperate resuscitation Virginia was declared dead.

Virginia is the very reflection of our healthcare system, it’s performance report: everything that is wrong and right about it, from over and inappropriate use, poor coordination, goals and priorities that are at times misplaced,  to the availability of modern advances and plenty resources at our disposal. Too bad such bottomless resources were not able to save Virginia’s life. Worse still, our failure to steward such resources threatens to pull the entire economy, and everybody else down together in a landslide.

Kiran Raj Pandey is an internal medicine resident who blogs at page59.