“For someone who went into medicine to ‘help people,’ you sure do talk about dying a lot,” my mother told me one day on our brief weekly phone call. I try to get in a phone call to my mother once a week so she knows I’m alive, surviving my intern year. I had been on medical intensive care unit (MICU) service and it had been a rough week. Being …
Doctors cannot predict when the end of life truly comes
I’m told every doctor has their list of unsolved patient mysteries. Those patients where something terribly awful or something miraculous happens for which you lay awake at night trying to understand. The nature of doctors is to want solve problems and figure out medical mysteries in sleuth-like Sherlock Holmes fashion. It’s these unsolved mysteries that you remember as they perplex you for days, weeks, possibly years after.
For me, it happened …
The fine line between compassion and detachment
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