"What would you do if it were your kid?" - An Invitation for Empathy

(Ed. - Please welcome Jennifer Linebarger, MD, MPH, FAAP to Pallimed.  Jennifer joins us and will be helping beef up our pediatrics focus here at Pallimed. We are thrilled to have her! - Sinclair) I had just begun reading Dr. Danielle Ofri's latest book, "What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine", when I opened The New England Journal of Medicine to find David Korones' essay "What would you do if it were your kid?" As he points out, nearly all of us have been asked, have heard this "plea to share with them, as a partner, the heavy burden of decision making." And nearly all of us have squirmed in our seats a little each time. I still remember the child in the ICU, sedated and on a ventilator as her parents waited for the fungus in her lungs to clear. The note on her door said, “Docs, if ‘Plan A’ didn’t work, the alphabet has 25 more letters! So stay cool.” Yet, the infection was persistent, and her parents were asked to decide – continue as is, perform surgery to remove the fungal ball, or to withdraw the ventilator support and keep her comfortable as she died. The whole team gathered with the parents – the ICU doc, the BMT primary, the infectious disease specialist, the cardiothoracic surgeon, and me, the palliative care doc. The options were presented. The table fell silent as the parents processed the decision before them. Then the father asked, “What would you do?” And after a few furtive glances, one-by-one e...
Source: Pallimed: A Hospice and Palliative Medicine Blog - Category: Palliative Carer Workers Authors: Source Type: blogs