I’ve been a doctor for one year. Two years of clinical rotations in medical school ill-prepared me for the reality of this job. Not that I went to bad medical school by any means; working in health care is simply something you can’t learn from a textbook or even on the sidelines as a marginally involved medical student. It is immersive.
Working around death and dying individuals can be mentally and physical exhausting, especially in an acute setting like a hospital. Only a few months of residency and everyone has at least one code blue story, that time that things went so badly it would be laughable if only the result hadn’t been someone’s death. There are team debriefs, moments of silence, chaplains who check in with family and staff alike. Code deaths are hard. The raw emotion in the setting of an adrenaline-producing experience is what emergency medicine and ICU folks seem to love and thrive on. But deaths on normal hospitalists teams are rarely that dramatic.
Outside of the ED or ICU, deaths more often happen on comfort care, in other words, hospice in the hospital. On the surface, these deaths are easier; no overhead pages, no running to the patient’s bedside, no mass of highly skilled nurses and doctors working in a controlled chaos to bring someone back only to not succeed. Instead, a page from nursing, a pulseless patient, a grieving family, and the quiet of a room.
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