"No show." Those two little words usually mean someone forgot their appointment, or couldn't find a ride, or changed their phone number and didn't get the reminder call. So I was offended for you when I looked up in the middle of clinic to see that you had been marked as a "no show" for your hospital follow-up with me. I had gone over your chart the night before and walked into clinic happy to start a busy afternoon with a friendly face, only to find out that you had died the day after you were discharged. Because it happened outside of a healthcare setting, there was no documentation in the computerized record that status asthmaticus had sucked the life out of you.
You, who came to me when you felt a lump and needed to know whether it was breast cancer. You, whose roommate kicked you out for fear of getting sick from your chemotherapy and radiation. You, who survived so many complications until you could finally get your bum shoulder fixed. You, who sounded so agreeable on the phone when I reminded you after your pre-op visit that if you could find the money for it, an inhaler would help with your trouble breathing. I thought you needed one, at least while the weather was changing.
When the clinic manager told me you had passed away, I hoped he meant some other patient. Maybe you would have laughed self-deprecatingly when I told you I dropped everything I was holding in order to channel all my energy into standing upright in his office rather than crumpling to the floor. As he stood up to hug me, I don't think he thought I was the kind of resident to cry at a patient's death. Maybe I didn't either, since I had never done it before.
I had seen patients die of cancer and of overwhelming infection. There was the middle-aged man I was sure I had killed with too much Valium for the seizures from the tumors in his brain, whose mother's vitriolic comments after his death surprised even seasoned ICU nurses. I tried to get closure around the woman whose fingers and toes were black and gangrenous from the blood pressure medications needed to keep her heart pumping, whose husband let her go on my one day off. I have done CPR on children we knew were not going to survive, including a baby whose mother tried so hard to get pregnant and then fell asleep with her on the couch. I was able to collect myself after those deaths. But for you I put my face in my hands and sobbed.
Was it because of the shock of expecting to see you and then realizing I never would again? The injustice of surviving cancer only to succumb to a treatable chronic condition? The fact that you were only a few years older than me? Or that despite proudly being "[your] doctor," I had not been able to keep this from happening during the peak time for asthma attacks?
When I left clinic at the end of the afternoon, I stopped by the clinic manager's office again. He asked how I was doing, and he remarked that caring for patients is what makes medicine and nursing so hard. He is right, but I also believe that caring for you made being your doctor easy, because it was less of a job and more of a calling. Maybe it is better that I missed the funeral and will always remember how vivacious you were at our last appointment, complaining that the surgeon had not prescribed you enough pain medication.
Upon more sober reflection, I realize some of my tears may have been in anger: that no one called your primary care provider after declaring your time of death. That the chart did not alert me to your status as a "deceased patient" when I was preparing for clinic between a long day at the hospital and a few hours of sleep. And that the electronic medical record does not have a designation for "a patient who cannot keep her appointment because she could not afford a life-saving medication."
Sincerely,
Your Doctor
This is What Residency Looks Like LXXV. You can find the previous post about CPR training here. The next post, about the view from the children's hospital, is here.
The ones I cried over was the 3 years old child who bled to death after a Tonsillectomy. His parents had gone home to sleep because they were tired. The one who stayed with him was his pediatrician ( he had not done the surgery). And I cried with the father whose teen aged son died of hemorrhage after sniffing glue. It was terrible to hear the doctor say afterward that he deserved to die, because of what did. Another was not a child but a man who come in by ambulance to the ER on Christmas Eve, accompanied by his wife and child, only to be pronounced DOA. This was the days before CPR and Medics on the ambulance. There was also the man that I repeated called the physician because of his severe pain. He never came in to see him, and it was the early days before we had a staffed ER at night. The man had a ruptured viscus and he died in surgery.
ReplyDeleteThere are so many more in the 40 years I worked in Doctors Hospital. Sometimes I just can't bear to remember them all.
It really is a privilege accompany other people on their life/death journeys, and the carry the burden afterward.
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