fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

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Tag: death and dying

September Third Year

Today a patient died. Jake was forty years old. When he came into the emergency room, Jake was dying of sepsis. I gave him some pain medication, and he just slipped away. I did try to save him. As his blood pressure dropped, I ran fluids and antibiotics. I put his head down to keep blood flowing to his brain. I ordered labs and an X-ray and an EKG.

I had taken care of Jake several times during his previous hospitalizations. He was sweet, but tired. He was blind from diabetes, and his irises were gray-white. I think he shut his eyes as he died, but I can’t quite remember.

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No One Left to Save

“Do you want to call time of death?”

I stared up at my resident Hassan, shocked by his question. My stethoscope was still pressed to the elderly patient’s emaciated chest. Her agonal breaths, those last shallow breaths the body takes before death, had ceased. Only silence filled my ears.

Hassan smiled at me. I knew that he was offering this to me as a reward for all my hard work, but still, I was stunned.

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When they ask how he died I tell them

he found the gate unlatched,

                                                                               crossed the downy path

 

                                                    into the volant field,

 

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Going in Peace

All too often in my forty years of practicing medicine, I’ve seen patients die hard, lonely deaths—lying on a stretcher under the emergency department’s glaring lights, or all alone in an ICU bed.

In extreme situations, the patient is covered in medical equipment: a breathing tube in the mouth, defibrillator pads on the chest, monitor leads on the torso, IV lines dangling from the neck and arms. When family members finally enter the room, it’s heart-wrenching to see them weep over their loved one, to whom they never got to say goodbye.

But it doesn’t always happen this way.

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Even Now

Two decades ago, during my first week
as an X-ray tech, I watched a boy die.
He was, thankfully, not a boy I knew
or loved but one I’d gone to X-ray.

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Saying the D-Word

It was late in the evening, and I was ready to start my night shift as an intern in the intensive-care unit. I sought out my fellow intern, who was finishing his shift, so that we could perform signout–the ritual of passing the patients’ information from one clinician to the next.
“Mrs. Klein in Bed 15 might go,” he whispered.
“Go? Go where?” I asked. “It’s 10 o’clock at night.”
“I mean she might go away.” He wasn’t making eye contact with me.
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That Is All

Scott Wilson ~

God,

Take her breath, still her heart, and
clean her body out with a spoon.
Wring her spirit in the river and
place her eyes beside the moon.

Fold up her memories in a dresser and
frame her smile in the sky.
Turn up her laughter in the darkness and
let her freckles start to fly.

Smoke her love out with tobacco and
sow her kindness into the seas.
Diffuse her voice upon the mountains and
pollinate her sorrow with the bees.

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Top of the Hill

Erika Walker ~

“It’s as if you’re at the top of a hill,”
the doctor said. My father listened
from his hospital bed, a plastic tube

fed him breath he could no longer take
for himself. “Each time you get sick,”
the doctor said, “you roll a little farther

down the hill.” His young face shone
above his white coat. I remember rolling
down green hills when I was young,

playing in the park where my father
had played as a child. I laughed, loved
the bump and thrill, the sweet smell

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The Morning After You Died

Dianne Avey ~

So this is what it feels like
to be on the other side.
Hollowed out exhaustion,
rimmed with the chaotic clutter
of struggle and hope.
Like the beach after a tsunami,
all those once-important items,
now floating around uselessly.

I don’t know how to start this life
again.

This morning, they came
and took the bed away.

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Late-Night Calls

Many things frighten me–from creepy-crawlers to turbulence on airplanes, from intravenous needles to walking across bridges over menacing rivers. However, late-night phone calls, especially from my family, send shivers up and down my spine. That is why I froze with fear when I received a call from my parents at 11 p.m. on February 28, 1986.
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Simple Acts

Dianne Avey ~

One night on my nursing shift in the cardiac intensive-care unit, I received a new patient from the operating room: an eighty-eight-year-old woman who had suffered a major heart attack and had just undergone emergency coronary-artery bypass surgery.

Her bed was wheeled into the room along with the usual accoutrements: six different IV drips, a ventilator, an aortic balloon pump and various other lines and monitoring devices. Her name, I saw on the chart, was Mrs. Green.

The young surgeon took me aside.

“I don’t care what it takes, just keep her alive for twenty-four hours,” he told me, clearly more worried about his surgical-outcome stats than he was about Mrs. Green’s welfare. The hospital and insurers kept

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