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I’m Grateful for the Doctor Who Gave Me Permission to Hope
Having hope in spite of terrible odds is part of being human
In 2016, we admitted my daughter to a hospice program. It was roughly eight months before she died and she looked strong and healthy. She’d been fighting a rare form of pediatric cancer for four years. Her lungs, abdomen, and bowel were filled with tumors and her oncologist was out of ideas.
Beside him, two computer screens displayed CT images of Ana’s abdomen and pelvis. Even I could see the dark shadows that shouldn’t be there. There were so many of them. “I’m sorry,” the doctor said in the tiny exam room on one of Ana’s final visits with him. “Do you have any questions?”
Ana had a question. “Will dying hurt?” She asked. She’d just turned 15.
The adults in the room exchanged silent, tormented looks. “We have all kinds of things that help with pain,” he told Ana gently and gave me the contact information of the hospital’s head of pediatric palliative care.
We had an initial in-person consult with him and some of his staff, then we’d gone on with life. There were no more scans for Ana, few medication changes, and no more talk of the next surgery. We were finally free from the hospital — at least while she was well enough to function — but this…