How To Deliver Bad News In Medicine? It Changed My Life
Let me tell you about a patient
In the meeting room outside the ICU, a family continued to contemplate the critical situation of their relative. He was hemodynamically very unstable, as a simple bath would provoke an episode of ventricular arrhythmia with an imminent threat of cardiorespiratory arrest.
That morning, the doctor in charge of the ICU and I were walking towards the room where the family was. The intention was to propose a plan to stabilize the patient. The plan was to conduct an urgent test to find the source of the patient’s bleeding, despite the high risk involved in transferring the patient to the CT scan.
In a calm but convincing manner, the doctor began to discuss the uncertainty of the situation with the family, and the possibilities, preparing for the worst but proposing an intelligent solution. He shared his professional and personal opinion, without giving false hope to the family, who understood that the end of his life could be near.
In this kind of situations, doctors usually have to deal with uncertainty.
Firstly, I remember feeling a knot in my stomach before delivering this news to the family, thinking, “What now?” — in short, it was a matter of life or death. And I recall feeling scared at the…
