Knowing your patients outside of the cancer diagnosis

Every morning I look at the obituaries. For a while, the local paper's obit page was my homepage at work as well. That may seem morbid. Part of it is that I am not always notified when my patients die (read that again; a lot of people are surprised to hear that, but it is true). But more of it is how much I learn about my patients and their families from their obituaries — who they were when they weren't a patient with cancer. I usually know the obvious stuff — spouse's name, how many kids, occupation. But I don't commonly know hobbies, place of birth, favorite charities.

This is the point of a poignant blog entry on The New York Times called "Remembering an 'Ordinary' Patient" by Theresa Brown who is an oncology nurse who writes in the NYT about her job and her patients. In this case, she wrote about a young man who died from toxicities from a bone marrow transplant. She summarizes the terrible regret we all feel after a toxic death, even when patients realize that death is a real possibility. And in a not totally unrelated vein, there was an excellent article also in The New York Times on Thursday about frankly discussing death and dying with patients. People (myself included!) still avoid the hard conversations with patients and families, so this was a solid reminder to not neglect this crucial, but difficult, conversation.