More and more often, however, these heartbreaking, infuriating scenes are playing out in my hospital and in countless others across the country. Patients shouldn’t have this kind of news delivered in an overcrowded, underfunded emergency department by a person they’ve never met. But medicine shouldn’t be so ugly and upfront and harsh. After all that time, I’ve become intimately acquainted with life’s fragility-how any of us can be here one moment and gone the next. Instead, she heard the hardest news of her life from a stranger wearing a mask and a shield, in an exam room steps from the noise of gridlocked hallways and a packed waiting room.įor 39 years, I’ve worked as an ER physician at Great War Memorial hospital in Perth, Ontario, part of the Perth and Smiths Falls District Hospital. More than anything, I wanted to say I could get her another year, or two or five. She asked me what would happen to her spouse-who is older than her and dependent on her-when she was gone. There was nothing else to do but hold her as she cried. It was up to me to tell her she had a handful of months, at most, and she should start getting her affairs in order. It wasn’t just one tumour they were everywhere. I treated her instead, and when I pulled up her records, I saw a re cent scan ordered by that same doctor, the results of which she hadn’t yet learned: can cer, already too advanced to cure. She had called her family doctor, but he was booked up and couldn’t see her for six weeks. A few months ago, a middle-aged woman in seemingly fine health came to my ER, feeling under the weather.
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