If you were in the emergency room and your doctor

said right in front of you to your family that you are probably not going to live through this, would you be happy your doctor was being so honest with you in your hour of trauma (can't move, can't talk, been laying on the floor for hours before being found) or would you think this doctor was an egregious ass?

and needs a remedial in bedside manner.

Stroke victim. Family = me included. I pull the doctor aside, and in a shushy voice tell her I don't want her to talk like that in front of the victim. Doctor says, victim would have WANTED to be honestly told what is going on.

Victim is note dead, BTW, but certainly the horror of being paralyzed and not being able to speak AND hearing you are going probably die tonite was MAYBE a teeny bit more information than was necessary at that moment?

I'd like to pull this doctor's license.

Un-effing believable.

Thanks for listening. It's nice to share.

if they really care. I know many and likely most do, but there are still the dicks that are there only to make money.

I can't say I've been through anything close to what happened with you, only sitting in an emergency room for five hours in kidney stone pain and watching several other people with seemingly minor problems getting admitted right away. The place was not busy at all ("dead") so I didn't see why no one couldn't at least give me something for the pain. I wonder how any of them would be towards us if they had to go through something traumatic, too?

And neither option would ever cross my mind...I say that as someone for whom this is not a hypothetical question. Something similar happened to me when I was 7 (and the doctor was saying this to my parents, not me.)

I fell on a lawn reindeer which entered under my arm and came out the back of my shoulder and severed several arteries, missed perforating a lung by about 1" and I came within 30 seconds of having my dominant arm amputated (or reattached depending on how you look at the situation...it was more than 50% off).

"Mrs. and Mr. Chan790's Parents...we may not be able to save the arm. In fact, his mortality risk drops to just about 0% if we don't even try to save the arm and just amputate it...it's been without blood-flow for over 20 minutes and is probably dead anyways." (That's a paraphrase, but that was the gist of it.)

By the way, I still have two working arms and despite needing semi-major surgery and two pints I walked out of the hospital two days later. The guy was a hell of a scalpel jockey and I was a tough kid.

But you FELL ON A REINDEER? :o

Being the early 1980s the damned thing was probably encapsulated in lead-based paints and fire-proofed with asbestos too.

It's okay, it's something I look back on and laugh about...while other people look at me uneasily because they don't see what's so funny about it. I'm kind of morbid...between my brothers and I, we each nearly died like 4 times before age 12...and yet we all survived into adulthood. (D and I are the same age, J is 8 1/2 years younger.) D spent two full years in the hospital, was on the make-a-wish list and received terminal-illness counselling for a mystery illness. J was still-born and resuscitated. I was nearly-abducted in the supermarket. D crushed his chest. A neighborhood bully beat my head against a curb until I lost consciousness. J jumped off a 25 ft. retaining wall. I nearly drowned in the swimming pool. Freshman year of HS, I was taking BP and J walked behind me and I just caught the top of his head on the back-swing and chipped a vertebra. D ran full-speed face-first into a hot frying pan filled with fried chicken and frying oil. It's like our own Edward Gorey book...it's amazing we didn't give my poor mother a complex.

I'm the only one who has never been de-fibbed or received CPR.

:o

That IS like an Edward Gorey book!

:o

and that bad news is better to be delivered without pussy footing around. Mostly because if you are not matter of fact about it, people try to pretend like its not true, which several studies have shown to be detrimental to both recovery rates, and in the grieving process. Paternalistic medicine is thankfully something of the past and numerous studies have shown that its a very good thing.

Besides, doesn't the person dying have the right to know the truth and be able to make peace with the fact they are dying, maybe say prayers to themselves if that is their belief.

Of course the last point is what gives you the right to withhold the truth any more than the doctor has the right to tell it. Nobody has the right to decide for another human being what can and cannot be told. You are only upset because in your particular belief it was better to not tell someone they were dying. Unless that person had a living will in which it was expressly stated they did not want to be told they were dying, then you can't say they didn't want to know or the doctor was in error.

Remember, it is common and healthy to feel anger during the grieving process, but try to not misplace that anger or allow it to blind you to other possibilities. For grief must be worked through and getting hung up in trying to find someone to blame can stall someone in anger and not allow them to continue to grieve.

1-we had just got to the hospital and the patient was obviously terrified already
2-the patient didn't die

I am not saying I had the right, nor would I have 'decided' not to tell someone if they were going to die. I am saying at that moment in time it is not the time to further scare a patient by telling them they are not likely to survive.

Fear lowers the immune system. The ability to come out of a traumatic life threatening situation like having had a stroke and not being found very soon afterwards is not the time to be told 'too bad, so sad, you are probably going to die tonite.'

Get it?

if you try to dance around it or sugarcoat it then the family just go into denial or as you said pretend they didnt hear. Best thing is not to use any flowery words etc but just to state the person is dead...

Not knowing until later that you were likely to die sucks; I'd want that small warning so I could resolve myself.

Tucker

The docs I knew always pulled the family aside to give them news like that. Never in front of the patient.

to prepare because "people don't usually survive what happened to her" -- they were talking about me. My sister says that was hard to hear, but she and my brother appreciated the honesty. Obviously, I'm still here. And the only thing I remember about the ordeal was someone asking, "Do we know if there's a DNR on file?" When I got strong enough in the rehab unit I asked to visit the ICU so I could thank the staff there; I also wanted to let them know that I had heard that tidbit. My docs tell me, by the way, that I would not be here had there been a DNR order.