Don't become a doctor #21 - haunted

When I was in medical school, a friend of mine asked me if I saw any ghosts in the hospital. No. I don't believe in ghosts. "It seems to me that doctors are always haunted by so many ghosts." I thought my friend was so very quirky, but she was so very correct. We are all haunted by ghosts.

My first ghost was a wonderful elderly lady s/p colon cancer resection and prolonged abdominal ileus. I placed an NG tube, like I'd done numerous times before, and she aspirated, went into respiratory failure, and ended up intubated. My next ghost was a woman with terrible breast cancer who suffered every moment that I kept her alive until her body failed. I have all these shadows hiding in the periphery of my vision: the colon cancer that we didn't find soon enough, the breast cancer that didn't respond to any treatment, the heart attack that happened the day after I did a complete physical, the elective orthopedic surgery who died on the table, the blood clot that I didn't prevent. And it would be nice if these shadows were just that, painful memories that hide in the darkness, but they are more than that. These shadows had names like Evelyn and Erik and Nancy and Steven. They had spouses and parents and children and friends. They had jobs and lives and purpose. And they haunt me because I took those things away from them.

In reality, I didn't kill them. Bad things happen. As long as a doctor is not incompetent or negligent, then there is always a chance that even the most benign circumstance could end badly. Life is not fair. In fact, I've written about this no less than twice already: Perfection and Guilty. And living with the choices you make, that takes some adult sized diapers sometimes, but it's not quite the same as knowing that you took part in an event that resulted in the death of a person. And you have to talk to that person's children or spouse, and tell them what happened. How do you do that without seeing the ghost over your shoulder? If you can't deal with the shadows of your mistakes having names and faces, then medicine may not be for you.

The story of diagnosing cancer

At this point in my career, I'm well experienced at walking a family through the process of a new cancer diagnosis. From the patient side, it's a whirlwind of confusion and waiting and vagaries, but the process itself is usually the same. So from the doctor side, here is the story of diagnosing a cancer.

It always starts with one abnormal finding, something fairly innocuous, but difficult to explain. "Not sure what this is" and "We need to do more tests" are the words I tell you, and I have no evidence that it's cancer, but something doesn't sit right. I have a hunch. I go through all the millions of possibilities to explain this one finding, and in the end, I just have a gut feeling about it. "I'm not going to get a good night's sleep until I chase this down" is what I tell you, as I send you off with some labs to repeat in a few weeks, or a follow up x-ray. And two weeks later, it's still off, and maybe worse. It's a PSA of 7 or a lung nodule that's a little larger. There is a lot of mental debate, and maybe the workup starts, or maybe recheck it in another few weeks, or some more tests. The descriptions get more concerning, but still very vague: "I'm concerned that we need to rule out some serious possibilities" or "we need to take cancer off the table."

There is always that one alarming finding. Maybe the PSA comes back 157. Maybe you find bony metastatic disease. Maybe your abdominal CT reveals diffuse retroperitoneal lymphadenopathy. And if your doctor is anything like me, then maybe he throws something against a wall or maybe she curses loudly and kicks something. The language gets much more alarming. Maybe I'll be cautious and say something like, "I'm not sure what this is, but I'm really worried that this is cancer." Maybe I'll be much less optimistic and say, "At this point, it is almost certainly cancer. The only question is what type and can we treat it." Whatever words come out of my mouth, I am still guessing, because I don't have a biopsy, and I can't be sure.

There is no room for uncertainty now. I have to know, beyond the shadow of a doubt. I must have a piece of it. So I call up the surgeon or the interventional radiologist and tell them I need a stat biopsy. And normally the surgeon would say, "Screw you!" and maybe he does say that, but he readjusts his schedule, and he adds on this case, delaying or even bumping surgeries he's planned for weeks, ends up coming home late and missing his daughter's soccer game. He curses my name, but he does it because this could be cancer, and he knows the stakes.

The pathologist may get a chance at it with frozen section, where they look at it during the surgical biopsy, but more often than not, we have to wait for pathology to do their magic, and that will be 5-7 business days. And we're all waiting. Those knots and butterflies, I have them too. And so I try to keep you busy. I try to get the medical oncologist and radiation oncologist set up. I get the PET scan done. I try to keep the wheel turning so that these next two weeks of waiting can pass a little quicker. And I'm holding out hope that I am wrong, that this whole workup was a big false alarm.

The pathologist gets it and does all kinds of stains and treatments and manipulations of it, and probably they could tell me after 3-4 days that it's most probably cancer, but they know what's at stake. They have to be sure. So they keep testing it until they're sure, and then after that, they test it more to figure out what weak spots this cancer might have, where we can target therapies. They produce an exact report, but as soon as I read, "Carcinoma" then I've seen what I needed to see.

Now finally, you sit down with me and I tell you, in no uncertain terms, that this is cancer. I can tell you this because I went through many steps so that I was sure, and the pathologist went through even more steps so that she could be sure. We are sure, but you will still ask, "Are you sure?" It's not a dumb question. I asked too. And it will seem like a surprise to you, this process that you were intimately involved in, but it's always a surprise. And I am surprised too, because I was hoping so hard to be wrong. I was hoping that any number of people slipped up, and that this is one tremendous farce. And that is why I had to be sure, so that when you are sitting in front of me, crying and asking me deep, painful questions I can't answer, like "Why?" then I can I can give you the one certainty I have: this is cancer, and of that I am now sure.

Game face

I got into an argument with another provider. I really disagreed with his care. I saw his patient, and she didn't know that her diabetes was ragingly out of control, that her kidneys were actively failing, that the fatigue and dyspnea she'd been having for the last few weeks were heart failure. It was all news to her.

If you've working in any service industry, you know that what goes on in front of clients is very, very different from what happens behind closed doors. That shouting match you had with your co-worker is described as a 'friendly debate.' The flagrant incompetence of your staff is described as, 'Oh, she's still getting things figured out.' When we're standing in front of the people we're serving, we are trying to convey a sense of competence, so that they can have confidence in the care they're receiving. And sometimes, it's tempting to use this colorful language with diagnosis and management. We simplify and generalize and minimize and suddenly, terminal cancer becomes 'a concerning finding' and overwhelming sepsis becomes 'a serious infection.' In an effort to portray confidence, we create a false narrative of the events unfolding.

So when I saw this patient and told her the rather unpleasant truth, that she had multiple major medical conditions all doing terribly, she was stunned. And when I talked to the other doctor, I did not have any nice things to say, because looking competent and being competent are not the same things. And if you're going to put on a game face, then you'd better have the game performance to back it up.

Privileged #7 - comfort

In medicine, we are allowed to be involved in people's lives in a way that few other professions are. And sometimes, that can hurt. I had a former patient who was a lovable and gregarious gentleman with many unhealthy habits, so it was no surprise to me when I got the notice that he'd been admitted to the hospital. I checked the hospital records, and his room was listed as in the ICU. That's not super unusual. Sometimes, the hospital fills up and it's the only available bed, but I had a bad feeling, and so I checked his chart. He'd had a cardiac arrest and was currently on a ventilator.

I don't always visit my patients, but when someone is actively dying, I make the effort. I wanted to see him, see if I could help, and maybe assuage some of the guilt I was feeling. So after clinic, I headed over to the hospital, but I had a couple errands to run. I stopped by the cleaners to pick up my shirts, and I grabbed a few groceries for dinner. By the time I arrived at the ICU, things were fairly quiet. I made my way to his room and noticed that the lights were off and the monitors off. Before I could go in, the ICU nurse stopped me. She was one of my favorite ICU RN's, from an older generation of nursing when the job was brutal but humanizing. We'd shared many a dark moment in the unit, and this would be one more. 

My patient had coded about 60 minutes ago and died. They had only just finished getting him cleaned up for family to visit with him, pulling off all the wires and tubes and needles and tags. She was just finishing up her charting, since she was the code nurse for the event. 

I was devastated. I had just missed him. If I hadn't run those errands, I would've been there, but I wasn't there and for the dumbest reason. I couldn't have changed the outcome, and I wasn't the ICU doctor anyway, but he was still my patient. I should have been there, and I wasn't, because I needed to pick up my shirts before the cleaners closed. 

While I was standing there thunderstruck, the nurse pointed to the door behind me. The family was gathered in there. I hadn't seen any of them because they were waiting until the nurses finished cleaning him up. "You should go in," she said. So I screwed up my nerve and walked in to find twenty people jammed into a space meant for ten. There were sons and daughters and grandchildren and siblings, and at the head of the conference table was my patient's wife. I walked up to her and started to apologize profusely, but she didn't let me finish. 

"Oh doctor, I'm so glad you're here. Thank you so much for coming. It would've meant so much to him that you came." She then introduced me to her children and her grandchildren. I had expected wailing and sobbing, but they all had such a bittersweet expression, like they understood that this was the end of a beautiful moment, like the ending credits of a movie. They shared stories of his life with me, the life that I had never seen, the one that didn't involve A1c's or blood pressures or cholesterol levels. They laughed and cried. 

"Do you want to see him?" she asked me. Yes, of course. She let me go, while the family returned to reminiscing of better times. I left the conference room and went back to his ICU room. I held his cold hand and said my goodbyes. The family let me have my time, and I felt almost greedy that I should be the first to say my farewells. 

I came to the hospital expecting to provide support and comfort, and instead, I was the one who was comforted by this family who adopted me for one brief moment. I understood then that I was not a stranger in his life. I had been a part, however small it may have been, and was welcomed into the intimacy of his life. Since then, I've had other patients die, and I've grieved with spouses. I have several patients who've lost spouses who were under my care. They still come to see me, a testament to their faith in me, and when I see them, we share a little memory and a moment, and I can't help but feel so lucky that I am welcomed into their lives, and so honored that I should receive such trust.