I’m in the back of an ambulance rig driving 110 miles an hour down the highway with the lights and sirens blaring. The knuckles of my right hand are crushed every four minutes as my patient has contractions. She cries only a bit. She’s sixteen and her last period was nine months ago, but she hasn’t seen any other physician before me.
This last contraction was an intense one — my …
Angela Harris has been here in the hospital for six hours, awaiting the results of her CT scan. I won’t take responsibility for all of that wait time: complicated CT scans and labs do take a significant amount of time to perform. But she didn’t need to wait the last hour.
She was waiting on me — her emergency physician — because I needed to confirm her cancer diagnosis with radiology, …
Cushioning the fall of bad news
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