I must have been looking disturbed. A couple of people, including the chief resident, asked me how I was handling the one patient’s death, and then stood still to listen to my answer. That’s the closest to those ‘debriefing’ things I’ve ever gotten (and I hope not to get any closer; surgeons don’t do well talking about feelings involuntarily). Just to have them ask was all I needed, and I told them I was fine. After all, in a way, when someone’s been deathly ill in the ICU for weeks, it’s a relief all around when they go. I feel kind of guilty, to be this relieved, but after all, they’re probably relieved to be done with the whole thing too. Except I’m fairly certain they’re in hell now (lots of Buddhist paraphernalia); in which case none of this is very good. . .
One of the patients who died recently had an autopsy, and I felt like I ought to go. I would be less of a good doctor and surgeon if I neglected anything relating to my patient, even now that she’s dead; but I also felt like a very bad person, to be semi-comfortable with seeing a person I’d known cut up in pieces. In the end, I got called away before matters had progressed very far; which was just fine with me, and I’ll wait to see the report in a week. (And the pathology residents: I can’t even imagine having that job. I can kind of picture what it would be like to do ER, or medicine, or radiology. But pathology is not just a different species, it’s a couple genuses [geni?] away. How can you be a doctor and not touch live things?)
August 26, 2008 at 9:04 am
Wow, you’re dedicated goin to the Post Mortem. I admit, its sort of fascinating when they open the patient up, and you see the extent of the badness you were fighting. Worst one was a Trauma Code that I intubated in the ER. I mean I knew the tube was in the right place, but the EtCO2 never changed color, probably because there was no Cardiac Output, so theres always that sliver of doubt. It was in the trachea.
August 26, 2008 at 2:09 pm
we were required to attend post mortems of all our patients. i always found an excuse not to go.
August 26, 2008 at 3:45 pm
My first visit here – followed a link in someone’s blogroll. So interesting – I am bookmarking you for future visits!
August 26, 2008 at 7:09 pm
This is how lucky I’ve been till now, only the second postmortem actually requested on a patient of mine. They’ll probably become more frequent now that my patients are sicker.
dlyn – I love the pictures on your blog, and will have to try making the zucchini bread.
August 27, 2008 at 4:33 am
“Except I’m fairly certain they’re in hell now…”
I had to go back and read that several times. Did you really say your patient who just died is in hell? How very Christian of you.
August 27, 2008 at 9:38 am
Thanks Dr A – say hi sometime!
August 28, 2008 at 9:46 am
S, your comment “how very Christian of you” makes almost no sense whatsoever.
If you’re objecting to belief in hell, consider that that belief is precisely a Christian position and to attack that belief as un-Christian is like attacking a Christian for being a Christian.
But perhaps you’re not objecting to the belief, only to expressing it. How is it unChristian to express a belief?
Or perhaps you’re only objecting to the rudeness of saying someone is in hell so soon after his death — well, there’s no way Dr. Alice would say that to the family, but this is her blog, not the waiting room.
Sarcasm is more effective when it makes sense.
August 28, 2008 at 6:24 pm
It is completely rude to state someone is going to hell. The last time I checked she was not God and wasn’t the one who gave judgment on who is actually going to hell.
August 28, 2008 at 8:49 pm
S – “Rude” is a surprising accusation. To me this is a matter of true or false. It might be rude if I had said it to the patient’s family, but of course I didn’t; that would be pointless, now that the matter is settled one way or the other, and pretty insensitive to their mourning as well.
The Bible clearly teaches that there is only one way to heaven. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” When I see people who are committed to another religion, it’s a reasonable guess that they are not worshipping Jesus, and thus not going to heaven. “It is given unto men once to die, and after that the judgment.” I don’t judge, but God has made his standards clear. We are all sinners, all deserving of God’s wrath; those who reject his forgiveness offered through Jesus make their own choice.
September 3, 2008 at 11:15 pm
I would recommend C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. It’s really not for you to judge or know if someone has accepted Jesus – unless you subscribe to a particularly narrow version of christianity in which case I’d call myself a fundamentalist and be done. But really – leave room for the spirit to move.
September 4, 2008 at 8:18 pm
Ivory – One of Lewis’s most famous lines in Mere Christianity goes something like this: There are only three options regarding Jesus and his claim to be the Son of God. Either he was lying, or he was insane, or he was telling the truth. “Just a good teacher” doesn’t fit in there. To make a claim like that, he either had to be purposefully lying to his followers, or suffering from megalomania – or telling the truth.
You have to either take him at his word, repent of your sins, and accept his lordship in your life, or you reject everything that he claimed, and take the consequences. That’s not a narrow version of Christianity; that is Christianity itself.
September 15, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Then there was that part about not judging, lest you be judged. And that part about the speck in your brother’s eye. And that part about not judging unbelievers.
One of the things that I love about Christian thought is how balanced it is. For every passage about eternal damnation, there is a passage about unconditional love. To balance the I am the way passage is St. Paul’s he has written eternity in their hearts passage. Christian theology is very clear that individuals can embrace the love of Christ without knowing his name.
One of my problems with christian fundamentalism is that it tends to gravitate toward the judgement, the fire and brimstone, and miss the love. While it is very probably that Dr. Alice’s patient was a degenerate sinner, it was unchristlike of her to think it; in fact St. Paul specifically prohibits such judgements.
September 15, 2008 at 8:19 pm
“it was unchristlike of her to think it”
I’m at a loss for words here, so I’ll just quote Jesus to Nicodemus: “He who believes on [the Son] is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.” Most of the references to hellfire in the New Testament come from Jesus himself.
“can embrace the love of Christ without knowing his name”
Maybe, but not by knowing his name and willfully rejecting it, which are two very different things. We could debate about a jungle tribesman reasoning his way to the existence of a Creator and Redeemer, but that’s not at all the situation of a Buddhist living in a society in which Jesus is known, and the Bible which teaches about him is freely available.
For yourself, as long as you claim that there is any way to heaven other than through the exclusive claims of Christ, you jeopardize your own soul. He’s the one who said it, not me. You can’t believe half of what he said, and not the rest.