I told my patient she’d never go home. I was wrong
When we doctors rush to provide certainty about how a patient’s disease will progress, we risk foreclosing possibilities.
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Doctors today are so afraid of protracting unnecessary suffering that they run the risk of being too certain, too soon, says the writer.
PHOTO: ISTOCKPHOTO
Daniela Lamas
I perched at the side of my patient’s bed to give her the devastating news: Her lungs were so scarred that she required the highest level of oxygen we could give without a breathing tube – a level only available in the hospital. And I did not believe that she would ever improve.
My patient, Linda LeBlanc, had three plastic ducks on her bedside table, and she played with one as we talked. She asked if there was any way she could go home. I told her I didn’t think so. We had reviewed the images of her lungs. She had not responded to weeks of steroids; she likely never would.
