This overdose was different

She clearly didn’t know that this overdose was different. This time, he was dead. In the emergency department (ED), we’ve become all too familiar with the twenty-something code-blue patient – usually male, often found at the train station around 7:30 am. The medical management of a cardiac arrest was familiar, but seeing it happen outside Read More …

Words as a surgeon’s tool

When a patient comes in with a fatal head bleed, that first conversation with a neurosurgeon may forever color how the family remembers the death, from a peaceful letting go (“Maybe it was his time”) to an open sore of regret (“Those doctors didn’t listen! They didn’t even try to save him!”) When there’s no place for Read More …

Dance pseudomacabre

William Carlos Williams.  The baby is in a smother of sheets and crumpled blankets. Its left eye closed, its right partly opened. It emits a soft whining cry continuously at every breath. It can’t be more than a few weeks old. Will it live? It is the mother: a great tender-eyed blonde. Great full breasts. Read More …

A Fortunate Man

The fortunate man here is the doctor. Sassall meets anguished patients on his rounds – the close relatives of the dying, those who are ill and want to die, the immobilized who are made desperate by a kind of claustrophobic fear of their own bodies, the insanely jealous, the lonely who try to kill themselves, Read More …

Death from the other side of the bed

Ian Rankin. I don’t really blame people for shunning the dying. I try to do it myself, not physically but mentally by painting other pictures in my head. My mother has perhaps less than a week to live. If what she’s doing now is living. Not living, just there. At least I can go to Read More …

Give me back my love – Orfeo’s doomed quest

Commentary All of us, doctors or health workers or patients, will suffer loss in our lives. That loss may be disappointment in an examination or a relationship, loss of faith in an ideal, or most seriously, loss through death of someone whom we love. Grief constitutes the suffering that always accompanies and follows loss. In Read More …

I spy…death

Dealing with death, Miguel Torga Coimbra, 10 December 1958 Twenty-five years now that I’ve been battling death professionally, and I feel more incapable than ever of understanding and accepting it. Halfway between the peasant in the pure state and pure intellect, when death comes calling I find neither the peace of the credulous person who Read More …