Tales From the Trenches: You Never Forget Your First
It was my first month of internal medicine during my rotating internship. I had just finished signing out for the day and was at the nursing station finishing up the last of my notes when the son of one of my patients (A 78 year old man with history of renal failure on dialysis who had just had hip replacement) came to the desk calmly and said, “Hello Doctor [Baffled], I am sorry for disturbing you after your sign-out, but my father doesn’t seem to be breathing right and since you know him best I was hoping you could take a look.” I said I would and he and I walked down the hall together. A nurse joined us as we turned into his room. I looked at the bed and immediately realized that my patient had stopped breathing completely. Without looking away from the patient I said, “Yeah. He isn’t breathing right. He’s not breathing at all. Call a code.”
As a floater on a medicine rotation, I didn’t actually work the code with the code team, just stayed to give them the history they would need. The patient didn’t make it. By the time I left the room the family had already been informed of the death. I was a bit nervous to walk past the son, but the minute I left the room the patient’s son shook my hand and said, “Thank you very much, doctor. I know you did everything you could for my father. In my religion it is considered very good to die on a Friday. I thank you. Be proud of what you did.”
