had never seen someone so yellow.
It was as if someone had taken a highlighter to the whites of her eyes and coated her skin with a layer of mustard. In actuality, the cancer in her colon had crept to her liver, where it blocked bile from taking its natural path out of the body, causing the ominous yellow chemical to spill into her blood and tissues. She had left the hospital two weeks ago, hoping to die at home, but came back with worsening pain and bloating in her belly — and because she couldn't stand to look at herself in the mirror.
"Doctor," she said softly — it was a title that still didn't feel quite comfortable to me, a newly minted doctor, especially coming from a patient several decades older than me. "You remind me of my nephew."
She asked me to sit for a few minutes and, shamefully, I hesitated. I had eight more patients to see before rounds and was already running behind. But I sat — listening to a dying woman's fondest family memories, my mind racing through a seemingly endless list of boxes I had to check that morning. When my pager went off five minutes later, I excused myself, promising to return in the afternoon to finish our conversation.
But I didn't.
There were new patient admissions. Emergencies on other floors. Notes to be written, consultants to be called, outside hospital medical records to be procured.
When I got home that night, I kicked myself for forgetting to stop back to see her. I briefly considered going back to the hospital but, exhausted, told myself she'd be asleep by now and vowed to arrive early the next morning to spend extra time with her.
She died that night.
The most draining aspect of medical training, it turns out, is not long hours, brash colleagues or steep learning curves — it's the feeling that you're often unable to be there with and for your patients in the way you want, in the way you'd always imagined you would be.
For hospitals to run efficiently, it is widely thought that they must operate like companies. There's a certain number of patients to be seen, doctors to see them, diseases to be managed, procedures to be performed, and hours in which all this must occur. For patients to feel cared for, we must treat them like family — with all the time, energy and compassion that entails
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http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/19/the-importance-of-sitting-with-patients/?
