"Medicine is by definition a moral activity" ~ John Patrick
I had my first death of a patient this week. I wasnt actually in the room when he died, but all the same, the experience has affected me. These are the things they do not teach you in medical school--what to do when you are there as a family is being told their loved one is now terminally ill, with days or even only hours to live. Watching a wife and 12 year old son as they cry, overcome with grief, at losing their husband and father. How to discuss the "CT films with good teaching points"---while the family is meters away in another room, and the patient lies at death's door a few meters in the other direction. Seeing streams of relatives, brothers, sisters, tiny young nephews come in to say their final goodbyes. What to do as your insides become liquid, your heart pounds in your ears, your eyes sting with tears, and you feel like you cant breathe.
How to remain "professional" and still be human?
Even with our best medicines, we cant save everybody--it is one thing to cognitively know this, another to experience it. As I read about the condition that was the cause of death for my patient today, the 25% mortality rate was more than just a number. 1 in 4. And the worst part is, for this patient--it was devastating misfortune. He had absolutely no risk factors for the disease that was his demise, the doctors still dont know why he got it--and he went from normal and healthy, to a few minor symptoms in a month, then minor symptoms to dead in less than a week.
I can see how without Jesus many doctors loose their hope.
4 comments:
wow...that was a sobering blog, Lauren.
Chamfort: "The heart must break or become as bronze."
Diane Komp: "The closer you come to [your patients], the less the pain. If you risk your heart being broken, you just may find it healed."
Praying for you as you learn the difficult art of being both professional and human...
Agreed, there is no way to know the impact of human suffering. Doesn't matter where it occurs, with whom or when.... it is still devestating.
Stanley Hauerwas:
"...[T]he physician’s basic pledge is not to cure, but to care through being present to the one in pain. Yet it is not easy to carry out that commitment on a day-to-day basis. For none of us has the resources to see too much pain without that pain hardening us. Without such a hardening, something we sometimes call by the name of professional distance, we fear we will lose the ability to feel at all...
[M]edicine is first of all pledged to be nothing more than a human presence in the face of suffering...To learn how to be present in that way we need examples — that is, a people who have so learned to embody such a presence in their lives that it has become the marrow of their habits. The church at least claims to be such a community, as it is a group of people called out by a God who, we believe, is always present to us, both in our sin and our faithfulness. Because of God’s faithfulness we are supposed to be a people who have learned how to be faithful to one another by our willingness to be present, with all our vulnerabilities, to one another. For what does our God require of us other than our unfailing presence in the midst of the world’s sin and pain? Thus our willingness to be ill and to ask for help, as well as our willingness to be present with the ill is no special or extraordinary activity, but a form of the Christian obligation to be present to one another in and out of pain...
Thus medicine needs the church...as a resource of the habits and practices necessary to sustain the care of those in pain over the long haul. For it is no easy matter to be with the ill, especially when we cannot do much for them other than simply be present. Our very helplessness too often turns to hate, both toward the one in pain and ourselves, as we despise them for reminding us of our helplessness. Only when we remember that our presence is our doing, when sitting on the ground seven days saying nothing is what we can do, can we be saved from our fevered and hopeless attempt to control others’ and our own existence. Of course to believe that such presence is what we can and should do entails a belief in a presence in and beyond this world. And it is certainly true many today no longer believe in or experience such a presence. If that is the case, then I do wonder if medicine as an activity of presence is possible in a world without God."
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