A rough day...

Today I think reality set in. I had pretty much a normal day, but at the same time a very rough day. I started off in surgery with Dr. Scherr as normal watching a robotic cystectomy with an Indiana pouch and then left to do NICU rounds with Dr. Frayer. The difficulty began when I walked into the NICU and a group of doctors and nurses were looking at a head sonogram. First of all, the subtleties they could observe was amazing, but the prognosis was also very challenging. As we later made our rounds, I realized this was a baby I had learned the name of just yesterday. And as the doctors and nurses discussed how they would present the situation to the parents, I realized that this tiny baby will have a very rough ride in the days to come. After rounds I returned to Dr. Scherr's surgery which was going very well. The surgeons ran into some difficulties near the end as the patient had previously received radiation and some of the tissue was very fragile. Just as they were finishing though, Dr. Scherr received a phone message from his secretary. A patient from just days before, having received a robotic cystectomy and recovered very well, had fainted in his hotel, was rushed to the ER and had passed away. Dr. Scherr then left the residents to finish closing as he went to find the wife of his patient in the ER and learn what had happened.

Over the past few days I've finally had the chance to do rounds with the residents. While they didn't understand why I would do this, it was very valuable to me to be able to see patients recover. What I didn't expect was the impact of learning the patient names (which I also did in the NICU to be able to keep track of the babies). I had previously tried to avoid writing down names in order to maintain patient privacy, but at this point I feel like I was somehow dehumanizing them by not noting their names. Now I try to keep track because although the two instances mentioned above are very difficult, they're also very real. Today definitely brought me out of the solely science aspect of medicine and into the humanity aspect of medicine.