I'm not a yeller

I had a patient who avoided seeing me for several months because his diabetes was worse and he was worried about what I would say. "I knew I was going to get yelled at."

So I asked a real straightforward question: "What makes you think I'll yell at you? It's your life. I don't have to live it." I have all kinds of advice and recommendations, but at the end of the day, I only experience maybe an hour of their existence over a year's time. 

I get this a lot from COVID un-vaccinated patients. They think I'm going to berate them. Not really. I am interested in giving them knowledge, and context, and compassion. People make their own decisions, but I want that decision to be well informed. When people tell me, "Well, I hear a lot of things..." then I want to talk about it. I am a doctor. It's literally my job to give you health information individualized and personalized to you.

One of my patients still isn't vaccinated, and he knows everything about why he should, but he is just totally terrified of needles. And he knows he needs to get vaccinated but just can't get over the hurtle. Let's work on this together.

Rituals

It's so cliche that you already know how it happens. The doctor walks up to the family member and says, "We need to talk. Please come with me." The person is ushered into a room and asked to sit. If they don't sit, then they are encouraged to sit.

"I have some bad news." Colloquially known as a warning shot, this is the clue to the person that this is bad. There will be no 'good news, bad news' game here. It's only bad. Next comes a formula repeated in every hospital in the country. A recitation of facts about what happened, and at the end, telling the family member that their loved one has died. The doctor says, "We did everything we could, but we couldn't save him, and he died." There are accusations, and shock, and tears. Tissues are provided. Hugs sometimes or a hand on a shoulder.

While it seems like a cliche, it serves a purpose. When people experience a situation they know, then it helps to provide structure to the process. It's no different than a Catholic mass. There are no surprises. You know exactly what is going to happen, what people will say, and when it will end. So when faced with terrible circumstances, it's reassuring to know that there is a structure to it, and a role to play. The doctor knows what they're supposed to do, and the family knows as well. So while reciting the words and gonig through the ritual, a person has for a brief moment the chance to truly grieve, cloaked in the words and actions already predetermined.

If you're looking for advice on breaking bad news, then there are lots of formulas. I think that SPIKES is as good as any. I do have a few tips.

1. Make sure you say that you did everything you could. In fact, use that exact phrase. "We did everything we could."
2. Make sure you say that the patient died in no uncertain terms. Not "passed", not "lost". Something like, "We couldn't save him, and PATIENT died."

You would not believe, despite saying those exact words, how many people will question you on those two points. And that's natural. Don't be defensive. The human creature can only process so much trauma at one time. People want to make sure that everything was done. People want to make sure that their loved one is indeed dead. It's not blame. It's shock.

Pencils and crayons, part 2

The word "acumen" means a quickness of perception and discernment. In medicine, someone with clinical acumen is sharp and fast to an accurate diagnosis with minimal effort or information. A doctor will walk into the room, take a quick smell and a glance, and pronounce to the patient, "You have a bleeding peptic ulcer." The patient and all the house staff are astonished at the quickness and the veracity of the diagnosis, and sure enough, the endoscopy proves him right.

The reality is that the doctor could smell the distinct odor of melena, and observed upon walking into the room that the patient was eating a plate of hot wings his wife had brought in, and had a beer belly. It was a pretty safe bet that he had an ulcer.

Acumen comes from the Latin word for a sharp point. And so, just like sharpening a pencil, clinical acumen needs to be sharpened too, but it's hard to keep sharp, easy to dull, and sharpening itself takes work. Because the way most of us physicians keep our acumen sharp is honed on the bodies of the dead and dying left in our wake.

I won't miss pancreatic cancer again because Mrs R is dead now, and maybe I could've done something to stop it if I'd only found it sooner. I won't use steroids to treat acute arthritis if I haven't ruled out a septic joint, because I've seen what happens to an infected joint that gets steroids.

Keeping a pencil sharp takes some effort, not much but some. Keeping a crayon sharp is an exercise in futility. At the end of the day, it's not just the sharpening that takes work, but we have to strive to be something worth keeping sharp.

Pencils and crayons

Getting compliments from patients can be funny. I like to get compliments, don't we all, but in my heart, I know that most of the time, these praises are unearned. I didn't do anything marvelous or spectacular. I did the doctor equivalent of a teeth cleaning, and for that, the patient is singing my praises to everyone they know. It's not earned. I'd rather get praise that I earned.

Lot of patients don't have good relationships with their doctors, for whatever reason. Sometimes, it's the patient having unrealistic expectations or demands. Sometimes it's the doctor not communicating well or not providing good care. Sometimes, it's just personalities not harmonizing. There are lots of reasons that a patient and a physician don't end up on the same page.

For this patient, I did nothing. I was assuming care for the person after their previous physician left the area. We talked about his medical issues and medications, about the clinic policies and my own personal policies, and then I did my exam. He was so shocked at how thorough my physical exam was (it was actually pretty cursory and mediocre), how detailed my history-taking was, and how well I explained what was happening next. He thanked me, and proceeded to sing my praises to my staff and then to his wife in the waiting room. But the reality was that the care I delivered was perfectly mediocre. It was dinner at Applebee's.

My MA was surprised. "What did you do in there?"

My reply: "When all you’ve ever known is crayons, then a pencil is gonna seem pretty awesome."

Evidence

When I was in medical school, we spent a lot of time learning about evidence. The only way we could make good decisions was to base them off of good evidence. And so, we learned about what constituted evidence, how to critically appraise evidence, how to consider the risks and benefits, what are the ways to understand different methodologies and practices, and how to understand hidden biases.

So when I first saw the Covid studies coming out in the early Spring, I was really shocked, because we were setting global health policies on extremely shoddy evidence. Half the time, we were basing direct patient care that day on what new preprint* had just come out. None of us really knew if HCQ had done anything whatsoever. We were reacting, based on bangs and flashes, like an animal scared by lightning.

And colleagues assailed and harangued me for doubting the wondrous effects of HCQ, based on the anecdotes they had heard. And when we were scolded as a profession for hoarding and stockpiling HCQ for personal use, several colleagues got defensive and belligerent, clearly caught with their hands in the cookie jar.

I've been surprised by how people act during this pandemic. I have seen a lot of questionable things done, and the reality of the situation is that when you don't know what to do next, then sometimes people will do anything, because anything is something, and something is better than nothing. There's a reason why I have that quote, "ut aliquid fieri videatur". Sometimes in medicine, we do things not because it's right, but so that we look like we did something.

*A preprint is a submission to a journal for publication, not yet peer reviewed.

Daughters

When I was early in my career, I was working with a medical student and we walked into a patient room. This was my first day on rotation, picking up my list from a colleague who told me that the family was very needy, and patient was ready to go to subacute rehab in a day or two. Instead, when I walked into the room, there were two daughters seated bedside. They greeted me by saying, "How do I spell your name? I want to make sure we get it correct when we sue you."

Anyone who's worked in medicine for long enough knows the story of daughters. My nurse doubted me, but over the last several years, she has seen it too. Every hospice patient, every terminal situation, every tough cancer case, there's always a daughter in the room, demanding answers.

Rather than get defensive, I sat down with the two daughters and said, "Let's talk. Tell me what's bothering you." And I listened for thirty minutes about how they didn't have any answers, about how their father continued to worsen slowly and wasn't getting better, and finally about how their father had a solitary pulmonary nodule on the CT scan before and nearly died from an aggressive lung cancer. Sure enough, he was deteriorating. His mentation and cognition were dimmed from numerous acute medical issues, and he never recovered from the aggressive chemotherapy that sapped his body and mind. I listened, and I agreed. I didn't have answers. I didn't know what this nodule was. I didn't know if their father would ever leave the rehab facility.

By the end of that thirty minutes, I examined the patient, barely conscious, and then said good-bye to the daughters after going through the details of the plan that lay ahead. I hugged them both, and while they fought back the tears, they both thanked me profusely, telling me that I was the best doctor they'd ever met, and how that time spent with them meant so much.

My student was totally awestruck. He had no idea that such a chance encounter in the hospital could lead to such a profound moment for a family. We stepped into the nursing station for a moment while I talked to the patient's nurse about modifications to the discharge plan. While writing some orders, I turned to my student.

"I did nothing skillful in there today. I sat and I listened to two daughters who care very deeply for their father, and who desperately want answers. The lesson you should take away from this case is--"

"We should listen to our patients and their families?" my student suggested.

"What? No. The lesson is that if you go into a room and see daughters at the bedside, get yourself ready. You're about to get rocked."

This is the job (it always has been)

We live in a Covid world now, and it's a different reality than what existed for the last 50 years. We got a little taste of it after 9/11 with all of our bioterror scares, and a hint of this when SARS happened. But now, we are full-on living in a pandemic reality. Lots of people go into medicine for a variety of reasons, not all of them altruistic. Some people want to acclaim and prestige. Some want the lifestyle and income. Some want to help people. Some want to save themselves.

There's no "right" reason for being a doctor, but there are plenty of wrong ones, and by wrong I mean that the reason will not sustain reality. Times will get hard, and when that happens, the thought of donning your white coat and fighting disease, it loses its luster. And people will complain that this wasn't what they signed up for. They didn't sign up for risking their lives every day, putting themselves in harm's way with numerous possible chances to catch a deadly and highly contagious disease. But I have bad news for those people. This is the job. It always has been.

It's the same job that people faced when SARS hit and whole hospitals were quarantined, and health care workers died without any loved ones ever seeing them for that last time. It's the same job that people risked catching AIDS every day before anyone knew just how AIDS was transmitted. It's the same job that billions all over the world still face with the dangers of tuberculosis, ebola, and numerous hemorrhagic fevers. And now it's Covid. There will always be something. When Covid is done, there will be a new disease, a new risk.

One of my colleagues has refused to see patients in person. I get it. It's a scary world out there. Every patient represents another chance at contracting a potentially fatal illness. But at the same time, we're doctors. This is what we signed up for.

The right answer

I have an elderly patient at the end of her life. Her medical condition is deteriorating slowly but surely, and she doesn't know what she wants to do, or if she does know, she's not great at telling me.

Of all the things that could possibly end her, the malady is dysphagia. She can't swallow. The answer is to put in a PEG tube and start enteral feedings. The alternative is hospice. Either choice in her situation is reasonable. She could go either way, and no one could fault her for it. But she doesn't know, and asks me what she should do.

I wish I could tell her what to do. I wish there was a right answer. I know what I would do in her situation. I'll be damned if someone's sticking a feeding tube in me. Fuck anyone who tries to prolong my solitary existence. I was ready to exit this world at the age of 17, so the thought of shooting for 100 is nauseating to me. But she's not me and I'm not her, and I can't tell her what the 'right' decision is.

Sometimes, medical paternalism is nice. Sometimes, I really want to tell this wonderful person that I know what to do, and that I know the right answer. But I'm not God. I can only guess.

Within our lifetime

I saw a patient recently who was diagnosed with AIDS in the 80's. This is somewhat of a rare find, because for so long throughout the 1980's and 1990's, HIV/AIDS was a death sentence. He reminisced to me of his many friends who have all died, and now he lives a fairly solitary life. His community was eradicated not only by the disease but also from the hate and stigma.

And I realized that for so many people today, the 1980's AIDS epidemic is not even a memory. The vast majority of millennials were babies when fear of AIDS was raging through the US. It seems like some vague memory rather than reality. And we have chosen to quietly let those memories slip away, and I think that's sad, because it is useful to remember sometimes what this country was capable of, both good and bad. People seem surprised by this current political climate, but it is not very surprising to me.

I remember in the early 80's people began to notice that gay people were dying at an alarming rate and at very young ages, overcome by very unusual infections. And eventually, it was discovered to be due to a new virus called AIDS. No one knew how it was spread or who had it. There was no visual test or identifiable features. The only thing people seemed to know was that it affected gay people. And so I was openly encouraged to avoid gay people, because I might catch AIDS. It's a hell of a thing to tell a 7 year old.

I remember when Ryan White became a household name, this fresh faced white boy from middle America who was labeled as an innocent victim of the AIDS epidemic, as if others had somehow deserved to get it. But Ryan cemented in my mind that it was possible for me to get AIDS as well. And everyone clutched their children a little tighter. And even with convincing evidence that AIDS was due to HIV and was only spread through blood or sexual transmission, people feared association with gay people. Homophobia was in the casual vernacular. Using "gay" casually is such a bizarre reality to me now, when for so long it was an insult. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, seeing "faggot" fall away from casual vulgarity seems odd, when for so long it was just another insult on par with "bitch" maybe. When Paula Deen admitted that she had used the N word back in the 60's, and people crucified her for it, for a moment, I had some sympathy for her, because I've called plenty of people a faggot to their face. I still use 'gay' these days, and I know the 'correct' term is LGBT(QI etc etc), but 'gay' is very much to me a great term. It was for so long a word that inspired fear and hatred and mistrust, and to see it now being used for identity and inclusion, that is good for this world.

Even with prominent heterosexuals coming out as HIV positive in the early 1990's, it was still a gay disease. I remember rumors flying that Magic Johnson was secretly gay. I also remember when he played in the all star game, and so many other players discouraged him from playing for fear of spreading the disease. And I remember Greg Louganis coming out both as gay and HIV+, and the firestorm of controversy he suffered for cutting his head but still competing at the 1988 Summer Games, a comeback performance that was so inspiring that he remains as one of only 4 Olympians from those games I still remember (Carl Lewis, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, and Flo Jo).

When the AIDS quilt project started, it was really the first time I realized that the people being diagnosed with AIDS, they were people. They had parents, lovers, children, families, friends, jobs. People longed to remember them, and when I found out that the reason the AIDS quilt was started was because so many of them went unburied or placed in unmarked graves, I realized that so many people had so much hate, and were willing to apply it indiscriminately, even if that should mean disowning your own flesh and blood.

When HIV treatment first came out in the late 1980's, I recall the restrictions and requirements. Doctors had to ration medication, and patients had to be 100% compliant with AZT therapy (zidovudine), a medication taken q4 hours ATC (around the clock). Think about that for a minute. Your survival as an HIV patient was contingent on you proving to your doctor that you took a pill 6 times a day every day.

I remember that because the AZT schedule was so restrictive, people became suspicious of any person taking medications in public. Suddenly, HIV patients had to secretly take their medications and hide the bottles. I remember that even being tested for HIV was tantamount to an admission of guilt. It was such a significant factor that regionally and nationally, laws still exist regarding consent for HIV testing. And in part because of HIV, we have HIPAA to protect the confidentiality of medical records.

I don't know what it's like to be gay, but I know the story of HIV from within my lifetime. And to let these memories fade would be a disservice to all the dead young men who suffered not only from the disease, but from society's cruelty to their plight.

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.

Flight plans and unexpected turbulence

One of my patients recently found out that he has a terminal condition, and he is thunderstruck. He refuses to accept that this is the end. He says to me, "I can't just give up!" He tells me that he is going to beat this thing and win, and that he still has a fighting chance. But he doesn't. And I really want him to come to grips with this, because I want to make the end as pleasant as I can, and not misery.

And that's the problem of thinking of disease like a sporting event or a battle, because ultimately, everyone dies. Even if you win the game, the game is over. This is something you learn to come to terms with in internal medicine. Maybe a pediatrician or a subspecialist can insulate themselves from this reality, but my job is to try to extend longevity as much as can be reasonably done. I don't save any lives. All my patients are going to die, and likely while I am at the helm.

When thinking about life, I always preferred the metaphor of flying a plane. Every plane goes up, and every plane lands, and we want to go as far as we can, as comfortably as possible. And we don't get to choose our plane. We could get a Cessna, or a G6, or a Concorde, or even a 747. There's no choosing. We get the plane we get. But regardless of the plane, we're mostly all are trying to fly as far as we can and as comfortably as possible.

There are factors that we can modify. We can avoid bad weather or change our flight plan or change altitude or throttle. Maybe we know to do these things, because we got an airline transport pilot licence, and then we paid for good fuel, rigorously checked the flight plan, and had the best mechanics look over the plane with a fine tooth comb. Or maybe we never got a pilot licence because it was too expensive. Or we started out in a terrible airport surrounded by terrible weather conditions. Or maybe we didn't have any radar or doppler, and had to trust our gut about the weather. And maybe we didn't even know that these were things to worry about till we were already halfway through our fuel. Or maybe we decided to have some fun and did a whole bunch of air stunts, not realizing that it might cause stress damage. There are so many modifiable factors, and we can try our best to maximize our chances of flying far and smoothly, but in spite of our best planning, we could have a catastrophic failure of some little hydraulic tube that changes all of our plans.

And if something catastrophic happens, then it's not guaranteed that we are doomed. Maybe we can recover and still complete our flight plan. But some catastrophes we know will have no recovery, like if the fuselage gets ripped in half or a wing tears off. We're not going to make it to our destination. We're going to crash.

As a doctor, if I know we're going to crash, then my job changes. I'm no longer trying to help us get to our intended destination, but now I am trying to get us close to a nice landing spot, and help us land as smoothly as possible. Because there are bad crashes where no one walks away, and there are 'good' crashes where the survivors look back and think how lucky this was, given the circumstances. And so I'm pointing out to ease up on the throttle, avoid this weather cell, aim for this strip of highway, radio ATC and let them know of our situation, so there can be resources ready to meet us on the ground: medical personnel, fire crews, police to clear the scene. And I can't do any of those things if the pilot is not ready to concede that yes, this plane is crashing and we have to make the best we can of this terrible situation. No one wants to crash. But if that's your only choice, then I can help.

What comes next

​One of my patients had a major event, and very nearly died. It was very touch and go, and after several months, she is finally on the path to recovery, and I was a little surprised that she pulled through, because of all of my patients, she is the most accepting of death. She's been a widow for years, and we frequently have talked about how she is ready to go. So I was surprised to see her clinging to life with such tenacity. She is not going without a fight, the person I had thought to be the most eager to have her ticket punched. 

Life is funny sometimes like that. On the news sometimes, you see people ready to commit suicide, and at the very moment they are ready to leap, they grab onto the edge desperately. There's a line in "Crime & Punishment" by Dostoevsky where he says:

... where was it that I read of how a condemned man, just before he died, said, or thought, that if he had to live on some high crag, on a ledge so small that there was no more than room for his two feet, with all about him the abyss, the ocean, eternal night, eternal solitude, eternal storm, and there he must remain, on a hand's-breadth of ground, all his life, a thousand years, through all eternity - it would be better to live so, than die within the hour? Only to lie, to live!

I don't know what comes in the next life, but I don't have much expectation for what remains for me in this one. Maybe I will have a different perspective when I am in my eighties, but if I look at my life honestly, I am already coasting in neutral. I really wonder if when my time comes, will I also grab onto the edge?

5 minutes

There is a lot of research and publications about different interventions during patient encounters. A brief smoking cessation intervention, a brief psychological assessment, a brief social stressor history, a targeted exam to identify depression, get up and go, cognitive evaluation, MMSE, MoCA, GAD7, PHQ9...

When I went to a productivity seminar, the speaker noted something very straightforward. The only truly fixed quantity we have in life is time. Everything takes time. Sleep takes time, eating takes time, fun takes time. There is nothing in life that we do not value with time, and there is only a limited time that we have, in a day and in a life.

I have 15 minutes to make a change in a person's health. That is my fixed quantity. In that time, there are things that have to happen, things that can be quicker or slower, and when everything is tallied up, I have -3 minutes. It is no longer a question of which brief intervention I can fit in, but what required thing can I cut out? Can I skip diabetes management this time? Can I ignore the BP until next visit?

So when I am less than enthusiastic about your presentation on a 5 minute intervention on fall risk or a new screening tool for domestic violence, please understand that I agree it's important, but is it more important than a BP of 185/105? Is it more important than signing a patient up for a patient assistance program?

n=1

We are constantly talking about all of these people in this country who are dying from medical errors. According to a recent publication, it is the third leading cause of death in the US. But who is doing all this killing, because it's certainly not me, right? I haven't killed anyone because of any mistakes. But statistically, I have to be a part of this number. I made some little something somewhere, that when added up on a balance sheet, pushed someone from the "alive" column" into the "dead" column. But it's hard to know what to do about this, personally. As a system, there are lots of things that organizations do, like tracking and labeling, human factors engineering, checklists, etc. etc. But what can I do?

In medicine, we talk a lot about "n=1" studies. In a research protocol, n is the number of participants in a study. The bigger the n, the more powerful the study to make a conclusion. But in practice, it is those n=1 studies that influence our behavior. I missed a cholangiocarcinoma whose only significant finding was a mildly elevated alkaline phosphatase. That was my only clue, and I dithered. And now, I'm suspicious of every alk phos elevation, constantly wary of missing this diagnosis. But it is a fairly uncommon cancer. I'll see tons of breast and colon and prostate and lung cancers in order to see one more cholangiocarcinoma. Of the 454 cancers found yearly per 100,000 population, cholangiocarcinoma makes up 1-2 total. There will be 452+ other cancers that I am going to see before I see another one. But here I am, fretting about a mildly elevated alk phos, wondering if I should get an MRCP.

A friend of mine described being a doctor as being continuously haunted by ghosts. There is always some ghost of a previous patient hanging over you, reminding you of your mistakes and failings. And it takes a fair bit of bravery to count up those ghosts and look for any patterns.

The right thing

Recently, I had to go to a meeting where we reviewed our HCAPS scores and other quality metrics. If you don't know what these are, then you're lucky. And we've had industry experts come in and talk to us about "Here's how to get your HCAPS better!" or "Shaving down your length of stay" or some other talk, in order to game our numbers and earn ourselves a few extra nickels. Most of the time, I play on my phone the whole time, or zone out completely. I have open disdain for such talks, not because quality of care is important, because it is. Quality of care is extremely important. But average LOS and HCAPS and HEDIS and all these quality metrics are all surrogates. I can make those numbers better, but that doesn't mean that I'm a good doctor.

However, one of these speakers said something that reached me. "The most important thing," he started. "...is that we do what is right for our patients. That's job #1. Then, we should figure out how we can get paid better for it. But even if we can't get paid better, at least we know we did what is right."

I spend a lot of time doing what is right, rather than what is expedient or what gets me more money. And that sounds so estimable and noble, but in reality, that is hard work. That is spending time arguing with an insurance company over a refused prior authorization, or seeing that patient who came in so late to their appointment but with acute problems that can't wait till next week, or spending 5 extra minutes writing a good note that most likely no one will ever read.

I used to be a little bitter that here I was, doing the right thing, and getting no credit for it. As well, there were plenty of others doing a fairly terrible job, and no one was calling them out for it. And it took this line from this industry expert to remind me that the goal wasn't to get credit. The goal was to do the right thing. That's the reward. Getting credit is just a pleasant side effect, should it happen.

When I was in college, I was the proverbial "nice guy" who never got the date with the girl, and I was similarly bitter back then. Here I was, such a nice guy, but ignored by so many women. And I was reminded by a very wise old lady that goodness is its own reward. If you are being nice to women only for the expectation of a reward, then that's not chivalry. That's being a creep.

Too little, too late

Last year, I saw Mr S, a wonderful gentleman in his seventies who was wheelchair bound and required constant supervision. The reason I was seeing him wasn't his paraplegia, but his terrible cholesterol and triglycerides, despite medications. I met with him and his caretaker, and we talked about his diet. In a shining moment of shared decision making and patient centered care, I asked him to tell me about what he eats and where we thought we could make changes. He proceeded to tell me about his diet, but we never got past breakfast. Every morning, he ate sausage, bacon, and 2 donuts.

We discussed what changes he could live with (his caretaker was more than willing to make the changes since her own doctor was fairly critical of her own lab results), and he agreed that he was willing to change his breakfast. He would get rid of the pork products, the donuts, and would change to a hearty bowl of oatmeal and fresh fruit. And his cholesterol and triglycerides improved dramatically. I couldn't wait to see him back in the office for his follow up appointment at 3 months, but the day before the appointment, his family called. He had died.

I can't help but feel that I made this guy's life miserable. He only had a few months left on this earth, and instead of bacon and donuts, he died with a belly full of oatmeal and cantaloupe. If I had known that we were dealing with a few months, what was the point of getting his cholesterol better? In medicine, it's really hard to know when you've been successful. Everyone dies. So what does it mean when one of my patients die? Did they meet their projected life expectancy? Did they get to median survival? The goal posts aren't the same for everyone. Maybe Mrs J who has bad COPD and CAD will be lucky to make it to 75. Maybe Mr O will live to be 100, despite his terrible diabetes.

People tell me that they appreciate the care I deliver, but it is exceptionally hard to know if you are a good doctor. Because the most important metric, are my patients living longer/better, has no control group for comparison.

After Mr S died, I went out to breakfast that weekend, and had pancakes and bacon and sausage. And I poured out some bacon and syrup for him.

Pain of life

I've generally tried to avoid getting into trouble with opioid medications, but in primary care, it's difficult to avoid. There are a lot of people on pain meds. And there's a lot of chronic pain out there. And all the talk these days about inappropriate pain medications, I feel it's disingenuous.

When I was in medical school, it was hammered bluntly into our heads that pain is an important sign, so important that it should be considered the fifth vital sign. We need to treat pain, and we should be ashamed if we lacked the compassion to address pain. We were told that the likelihood of developing abuse was so paltry that it wasn't worth discussion. We were indoctrinated into a culture of pain control that was whimsical and optimistic and did not take any measure of reality. 

Now, we are told that patient satisfaction is critical to excellent care and best practices. If you know an inpatient doctor who has never heard of HCAHPS, then that's one blissfully ignorant dude. And HCAHPS even has several questions that directly deal with pain. As if patient satisfaction has ever correlated with good medical care. It's a hospital, not the Ritz-Carlton. 

But I think that we have a really poor understanding of pain. From both sides of the fence, people do not appreciate that pain is not simple. Pain is tremendously complicated and the factors that govern it are not easily appreciated. I pulled my back in the gym and actually passed out from the pain. I couldn't walk for two days. I didn't take anything because I knew that eventually, the pain would go away. But for my 50 year old patient who was abused as a child and raped as a teen, abused by her ex-husband and abandoned by her daughter, she has no such confidence that her back pain is going to get better, and guess what — it doesn't. And so pain meds make life just a tiny bit more bearable. Is that the appropriate goal of therapy? Is it okay that the pain meds are only there to make the day go by faster? I don't know what the right answer is.

The digital age

A while back, our EMR system went down. It happens to everyone eventually. Servers have downtime, and sooner or later, you have an outage. Sometimes it's brief, sometimes it's long, but without fail, when it occurs, the frustration is instantaneous and furious. And the old guard bemoans how terrible EMR's are, and how they cripple our ability to care. And that is ludicrous. So let's take a step back and remember the days of paper. I remember them well. There are a few wonderful events that everyone who remembers paper charts should recall, and then find themselves resigned to saying that electronic records really are better.

Handwriting is far and away the most obvious issue with paper charts. When I was in residency, there was a cardiologist with such bad handwriting that anyone who could read his handwriting was often called to interpret, whether or not they were on that patient's case or even whether or not they were in the hospital. I have uttered the words, "That loop looks like a H, so I think we should start heparin." I spent a measurable part of my day as a resident simply deciphering the terrible handwriting of other care providers.

Much more troublesome than handwriting was late charting where people would carry around their notes and then insert them into the chart later in the day, or even days later. I got into an argument with a patient before because he was convinced he saw the neurologist, but there was no note from him. Two days later, a chart note mysteriously appeared. Or nurses would chart an entire shift of vitals at the end of their shift. It was so much trouble fighting for the chart that it was just easier to chart your information some other time, and so it was often impossible to get up to date information. And that's not even accounting for paper reports, like labs or x-rays. It wasn't even worth referring to the chart for those. You'd go to the lab database or the radiology database, or if you were supremely unlucky, some poor loser sacrificed his morning by getting curbside reads on all the chest x-rays from the radiologist.

On the devious side, people would sometimes misrepresent their charting by where and how they did their notes. Some people would slip their note in several days beforehand, or date/time their notes to misrepresent when the work was done. I've seen things charted in different sections so that it would likely be ignored by medical/legal but would be safe for billing.

And then there's the missing pages that would inevitably occur, much more terrible in the outpatient setting where you might lose a note from 7 years ago that suddenly you need. However, I remember losing preliminary cardiac cath results so that we had to go down to transcription and put a rush on the dictation, since the cardiologist went home and we couldn't reach him, and needed the report to determine if we could discharge the patient.

But nothing was worse than the missing chart. I have had a student walk off with the chart to the study lounge for 2 hours and we were in full fledged hysterics. I had an intern take the chart to dictate a transfer note and the patient coded, and we had no idea what was going on or anything about the patient. I had outpatient encounters where another clinic was sitting on the chart (another doc hadn't done notes for weeks), and we sent people over to that clinic to get into a chart fight.

Sure I get frustrated with EMR systems that I've worked with. They all have their drawbacks. But thank God we don't use paper charts anymore. What absolute hell.