Death

I'm going to get serious here and talk about something that we will all deal with a lot in our careers. Most of us have had experiences with death in our lives with loved ones, but now we're moving into a career where it will be a part of our daily lives. Surgery, Emergency, and Oncology will deal with death in very different ways than Family Medicine or Pediatrics, but we will all be touched in one way or another by patients and families. Death transcends our professional lives by affecting our personal lives and our very humanity. Having to always be strong for our patients will take a toll over time and may even desensitize us to the seriousness that is the end of a life. Maintaining our emotional connection to life, our sanity, and our love of patients will be something we must all strive to keep for each other. Even the strongest can fall, but friends and the family we have at UC will get us through the worst times, both now and in the future.

I lost both of my grandmothers and an uncle in the span of one year when I was 10. That personal experience was my first real exposure to death and had a profound effect on my life and changed who I was. Time went by, and I experienced the death of other family members and helped my friends through tough times of their own. However, last year was the first time I dealt with death in my professional life. I was in Sri Lanka volunteering in the Emergency Department when a lady came in with obvious symptoms of a heart attack. She had had the symptoms for a few days and was pretty unresponsive when she got there. An airway was established, CPR was started, and they got a line in. They couldn't get her heart started, and there was no change in her condition after a few minutes, so the doctor in charge called it. Time of death, 1:22. I wasn't part of the care team and just observed. I remember staring and thinking "Someone just died. Right here. Someone just died." This was much different from my personal experiences with death, but the same universality of the situation was still there. I felt empathy for the family but there wasn't anything deeper. I understood that this man had just lost his mother, but I didn't feel emotional sadness. That lack of feeling worried me. Was I a bad person? Did I not care? No. I did care. And I knew that everything that could have possibly be done for that woman was done. She was afforded the best medical care available, but she was not meant to live. And that brings us back to the universal truth: death is a part of life. Will I feel differently when it's my patient? Yes. Will I remember every person that dies under my care? Probably not. Will I remember some for the rest of my life? Most definitely.

All of us will see death experience the emotional consequences both from ourselves and our patients. When something happens, talk about it with others. Many people have had similar experiences and there's no reason to be alone. There's no shame in needing emotional support. Shutting ourselves off from our emotions will help us cope, but it will take away our very humanity. Every death will not affect us in the same ways, but there will be some that touch us in ways we never thought possible. When that happens and you cry, don't feel ashamed because you should be able to handle it, but feel proud you can still feel those emotions after all those years.

Of all the things you learn and forget, never forget that you are human. Cherish it and know that it will hurt sometimes, but that hurt will make you a greater doctor than any class will.