Like combat-hardened military veterans, physicians don’t often talk about the ones they lost. When they do, listening to them provides an illuminating window on what it means to be a doctor.
Scott Eggener, an Associate Professor of Surgery and Co-Director of the Prostate Cancer Program at the University of Chicago, bravely discusses his own experience with losing a patient in a recent opinion post in the New York Times. His piece, an open and intense meditation on his experience, translates for all of us the pain and distress that accompanies a very bad clinical outcome.
What can be more traumatic than a patient bleeding to death before our very eyes? How can we acknowledge our impotence and failure to alter the outcome despite our best efforts and considerable skill and knowledge? How can we face ourselves, our associates, and mostly our future patients? It was my hands that opened the wound and my hands that failed to stop the bleeding. Is this what it means to murder? Do I deserve to be called a murderer? We shudder at the thought. We who are supposed to be life-savers have participated in taking a life. Or have we?
Dr. Eggener does not spare himself these thoughts. He talks about what so many recognize as the hard work of mourning. He thinks of his patient, his patient’s family and neighbors. He thinks about all that might have been. He ruminates and obsesses. He seeks support from those who have experienced similar losses but no loss is the same as any other. He must fight the battle on his own.
And fight on he does. Showing resilience, he leans on lessons learned from his father… to “get back on the mound” using his best skill and knowledge. The facts of his tragedy do not change but he does, with grace and dignity, much to the benefit of future patients and for each of us who learn of his story.