I will not let medicine dehumanize me

Dear Dad, I often think about the night you passed away.  I was caring for you while you were dying from metastatic colon cancer.  Every hour I woke up to give you Dilaudid so you wouldn’t feel pain and Ativan so you wouldn’t be scared.  You had only just been diagnosed eight months before.  Despite aggressive chemo, radiation, abdominal surgeries, and all the hope and prayer in the world, the cancer still spread.  Little did we know, when I started my internship in family medicine, you would be gone before the year was over. I hadn’t been there for you during most of your battle with cancer.  When the emergency room discovered the mass in your colon, I was miles away rounding with my inpatient team, a month into my residency.  When you were told it was probably curable, I was asleep after a long night shift in the pediatric emergency department.  When you were crying in pain from chemotherapy in the middle of the night, I was on labor and delivery helping a brand new father cut the umbilical cord of his first child.  When we found out your cancer had spread all over your liver, I was curled up in the corner of my call room listening to your doctor read your devastating CT results over the phone.  When the surgeon told us your bowels were blocked by tumors, and you had little time left, I was crying over the steering wheel of my car in the hospital parking lot.  I was there the night you died, but there was so much that I missed; it pains me think...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - Category: Journals (General) Authors: Tags: Physician Cancer GI Source Type: blogs