Not long ago, I heard a respected senior colleague recount to a group of medical students and trainees the story of a patient who had died under his care some 15 years earlier. Afterward, he had spent hours talking with the family, trying, he said,
“He’s back?” my colleague asked, eyes widening as she passed the patient’s room. “He’s in the hospital again?” Slender, pale and in his late 60s, the man had first been admitted nearly a year earlier with pressure in his chest so severe he had trouble
Birdlike and in his 80s, the patient had come to the hospital complaining of a new cough. But it was not he whom my colleagues and I found most disquieting. It was his middle-aged daughter. With a practiced dexterity, she had managed to wheel her