Breaking bad news is probably one of the worst part of the job. Yesterday the team had to tell a 40-year-old man that he had colon cancer that had invaded his bladder. Unfortunately he was eating when we got around to his bed. I saw his face turned a shade paler and he was weakly pushing his food around his container after everything was said. After that just one cubicle away, I had to tell the family of an illegal immigrant who presented with severe head injury with craniectomy done, but post-surgery he was slipping away, so the team decided that we couldn't do any much more for him. So basically I had to tell the family that we had given up on him. So no escalation of medicines, no inotropes and, no resuscitation. So we are hoping he dies soon, so his suffering would end soon, so that his relatives' anguish would be over too, so that no infection starts in the ward from him, so that we could prepare his bed for the next patient.
1 comment:
It sucks to tell people who's hoping to get well the dreaded bad news but someone's gotta do it huh...
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